What a lovely time it is to be a New South Welsh person.

Summer is two weeks away. We're out of lockdown. The international border is open for citizens

and permanent residents, at least. The rest of the world is still persona non-grata for Australia,

but that'll change next year.

New South Wales has a new Premier, new leader, and things are frankly looking up.

We're outside again.

We're wandering around.

The windows are open.

People are having parties.

There are barbecues going on.

And I don't want to say I told you so.

But to the rest of the world and to those of my listeners who were wringing their hands

and sending me furious tweets after my various appearances on American podcasts

and writing in Barry Weiss's newsletter and in defense of vaccine mandates and trying to explain

Australia's pandemic overreach, not to justify it, but to contextualize it and to make the point

that whilst I disagreed with much of Australia's response, it was all within the context of

things that liberal democracies might want to do in a time of emergency.

It was just that Australia's emergency had been time shifted from the rest of the world

because Australia had blocked the rest of the world out, including the pandemic, largely,

with the exception of Melbourne and Victoria, largely from two months after the pandemic in 2020 until the southern winter of

2021. Anyway, all of that's water under the bridge now, but there was a lot of Australia has fallen.

Australia has become an authoritarian, totalitarian dictatorship, and my response was always

...