The Spirit of Ned Kelly lives on in Lockdown Australia: Half or more of all Australians reveal themselves as lockdown outlaws

Like those devout Catholics who practice birth control because they don’t really believe it is a sin that will condemn them to eternal damnation, members of the Church of Lockdown widely disobey the social distancing scriptures because the lockdown faithful apparently don’t really believe that the coronavirus virus will condemn them to an early grave or that their compliance with lockdown rules is necessary to avoid moral condemnation.

Researchers from Griffith University’s Criminology Institute in the Australian state of Queensland have surveyed 1,600 Australians on their adherence to mandatory social distancing rules during lockdown (Griffith University — 2 June 2020). They found that:

· six in ten adults “went shopping for non-essential items when healthy” and/or “went shopping for essential or non-essential items” whilst showing COVID-like symptoms;

· five in ten “socialised in person with friends and/or relatives they didn’t live with”; and

· five in ten “left the house without a really good reason”, and

· four in ten “travelled for leisure”.

The rest ‘never’ did any of this, motivated to embrace lockdown primarily by feelings of a “duty to obey the government” and “personal morality” (believing they have a moral responsibility to act to protect others by staying locked up) rather than any fears about the health risk from the virus itself.

The government has done a real propaganda job on the obedient conformists but, with half of all Australians revealed as lockdown non-conformists, it seems that lockdown is honoured more in word than in observance. Thus, the record approval ratings for Australia’s political elite can coexist with the widespread failure of those approving citizens to follow all their masters’ rules.

That half of Autralians haven’t fallen for the official line on the dire threat of the virus or the necessity of lockdown shows that the apparent lockdown hegemony is not as solid as the opinion polls may indicate. The challenge for lockdown sceptics is how to turn popular individual disobedience into mass political dissidence.