Well I'm out for my walk around the park near my house in locked down Sydney

on a glorious sunny warm winter's day

because I can't go to where I would normally record this for you

because it's more than five kilometres away from my home

which is the radius

that I'm currently allowed to move in. And even within that radius, I can only go out for a legitimate

reason, one of which is exercise, hence my walking podcast introduction today, and you get to

enjoy the bucolic sounds of birds in the background and perhaps the occasional truck.

I woke up to two interesting tweets this morning.

One by an economic historian who's a conservative, who's anti-lockdown in the states

tweeting, Australia is currently a militarized police state

with one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world.

They also have an abysmal vaccination rate due to government incompetence.

Now I have been very critical on this podcast and on the radio airwaves and elsewhere

about how the government bungled the procurement of vaccines last year.

But even I would say that at this point, there's no point being critical of that right now.

Everyone is all hands on deck desperately trying to get as many vaccines into as many arms as

possible. So we can criticise past policy decisions and I will continue to do so,

but it's a bit rich to say that right now, Australia is mishandling the vaccination.

Australia is also not militarised. There's been tons of misinformation about this that I've

seen in the United States. Even the BBC misreported this with a headline saying that

soldiers were going from house to house in Sydney

...