Authorities quickly put a dampener on James Ward-Collins (above right) in Sydney. PICTURES: ABC, Channel 7.

If you’ve ever engaged with the kind of ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘mask mutineers’ or ‘shutdown seditionists’ who flaunted the law at Saturday’s anti-lockdown protests, chances are it was an exercise in futility. There is no reasoning with them – despite the logic on your side – just as there’s no reasoning with someone who believes Donald Trump won an election with seven million fewer votes, or that the Immaculate Conception was an actual thing.

Their delusions meet a psychological need, so they’ll fight like Hell to keep them.

Psychological research suggests that those with a propensity for risky behaviour are more likely to be found among the broad coalition of COVID-19 sceptics who rallied against lockdowns in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Check out the Sydney crowd which had its own entertainment courtesy of fire-breathing James Ward-Collins. Think of his fire breathing as how efficiently human lungs can spread COVID-19, then consider that the mostly-maskless crowd is jammed together like sardines.

“Propensity for risky behaviour,” anyone?


CARTOON: Joe Heller, Hellertoon.com

Others may have felt the pangs of “psychological reactance”, where people insist they have freedom to behave how they wish and get their backs up when it’s threatened by, say, a lockdown order. Some anti-maskers (especially men) feel embarrassed or cowardly when they wear one, while others have fallen prey to the Dunning Kruger effect, in which they think they know enough about COVID-19 to scoff at the threat but are, in fact, “ignorant of their own ignorance”.

Certain Sky News prime time prognosticators seem to have succumbed to the latter, with tragic nationwide consequences.

None of this thinking is rational, of course, and pretty well all of it could be redefined under the broader, non-scientific category of ‘selfish prick’. “You say masks stop the spread, Dr High and Mighty, but they fog up my glasses and make me look like a wimp!”

“Now excuse me a moment while I affect my best Mel Gibson Braveheart voice”:


IMAGE: Paramount Pictures.

Of course, it’s not cool to actually admit you’re reckless, or selfish, or averse to being called a wimp, so you’d better have a bunch of smokescreen ‘reasons’ for being an irresponsible twat during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Readers will have heard them all: COVID-19 is no worse than the flu (pull the other one), authorities keep changing their tune on COVID-19 best practice (hey, it’s a fluid situation), there’s a 0.0005 per cent chance of thrombosis clotting from AstraZeneca vaccine (run for the hills!) and ‘I don’t know anyone who died of COVID-19 so it must be harmless’ (the old “my chain-smoking uncle lived to 110” argument).

Beyond that, we venture into tin-foil-hat territory. Last week on Sky News, maverick MP Craig Kelly actually claimed that people who are vaccinated are seven or eight times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the unvaccinated (his attempt, it seems, to match unhinged American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones).

Then there’s my personal favourite: governments (especially ‘Chairman Dan’ Andrews) are using COVID-19 as an excuse to impose Communism – ably assisted by Bill Gates and his microchipped vaccines – while Big Pharma lines its pockets on a hoax. Something like that, anyway.

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Sit back, take a breath and consider the sheer, post-truth lunacy of all this: could it thrive on its own? Or is this idiocy being promoted by a certain corner of the commentariat (and fanatical fellow-travellers on Facebook)? Some see a refusal to wear masks or otherwise behave responsibly as a badge of honour – ‘virtue signalling’ without the virtue, if you will – relegating COVID-19, an actual public health crisis, to just another front in the distracting and divisive Culture Wars against PC elites and science.

Which media outlets weaponise grievance and incorporate Culture Wars into their business model? Let’s ask prominent columnist and author Peter FitzSimons, who has some rather pointed views on the matter:

“At a time when the nation is in the middle of a full-blown COVID-19 crisis, desperately struggling on two fronts – to make people understand the gravity of the virus, and the virtues of getting vaccinated – we had Alan Jones (and Kelly) on Sky News this month, doing everything possible to make the situation worse,” FitzSimons wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Castigated by the ABC’s Media Watch last week, Jones and Sky saw fit to merely issue a correction, unperturbed by the prospect of actual punishment from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which “can only waggle a disappointed finger,” or take a highly unlikely ‘nuclear option’ against the broadcaster’s licence. ACMA can’t impose “mid-tier” penalties – substantial fines, for example – and the current government seems just fine with that.

To recap, we are back in the throes of a pandemic other developed countries seem well on the road to defeating, brought on by avoidable government blunders and exacerbated by reckless, selfish pig-headedness among some Australians.

Stirring the pot are the usual suspects at Sky News and other News Corp outlets, which not only contribute to the problem but embolden the gullible, who in turn take to the streets, hit police horses, assault and harass journalists and actively contribute to super-spreader events.

Wouldn’t it be nice if News Corp and others were subject to some meaningful rules around, y’know, honesty? That’s not censorship; that’s telling the truth.

Of course, no mention of News Corp and its nefarious impacts on Australian society would be complete without reference to Andrew Bolt, who insisted Saturday’s protests weren’t a big deal because they happened outside, “in the open”. “Arrogant politicians called them ‘halfwits’, ‘boofheads’ and ‘selfish’, and sent in the police, who hyped claims of violence”, he wrote in the Herald Sun.

Bolt’s Monday column was headlined: “Calling Lockdown Protesters ‘Halfwits’ Will Backfire”. An unwritten subtext to this might have been: “How dare you treat them like halfwits? That’s our job!”.

For once, I agree with Bolt. I wrote above that “there’s no reasoning with them”, and the same goes double for insulting them: it achieves nothing.

Better to simply employ evidence-based policies against the spread of COVID-19 – are you listening, Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian? – and strictly enforce the rules on those reckless, selfish malcontents who flaunt them, no matter how hard they bleat. Nothing says, “F-ck your feelings, snowflake” (isn’t that their line?) like strict rules during a public health crisis, enforced for the common good.

A regulator with actual teeth might throw the book at Alan Jones, too. Now that would be a win-win.