G'day, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous conversations, the show where the chitty chat may be comfortable by the ideas and the topics and the perspectives that we address are confronting to one or both political parties, or ideally to all rigid cultural worldviews.

This is not a show where we shout slogans at one another or get hostile. It's where

we come together to jointly understand things, even things that might make everybody else

uncomfortable. This week on the show, science, microbiology, viruses, vaccines, tiny, wily, microorganisms that can crash economies, imprison entire populations, grind global travel to a hole to demolish our normal social customs, wipe out

industries and human lungs with blind but ingenious power. This might just be the most

uncomfortable conversation we can have right now because of where Australia currently sits.

If you're outside of Australia, then you're dealing with your own coronavirus maelstrom, but let me reflect a little bit about what's going on here.

Australia had basically eliminated community transmission of coronavirus using all of the scientific principles that everybody, that all experts and epidemiologists

knew that we should undertake. Stay home, shut down, don't go to school and work,

don't shake people's hands, social distancing, all of that. And that was highly effective.

The other column, the other pillar, the other strategy, the other component, was to

completely seal the borders and prevent any new cases from coming in from outside.

Now, this is a massive undertaking for a country like Australia, which is so reliant on foreign

travel, on inbound tourism, on international students coming to study at our universities.

I've spoken to a lot of Americans who say, oh, you couldn't possibly do that here. We're too big.

But really, in some respects, it's a more difficult thing to do in a country like Australia

because the connections with the rest of the world for a nation that is essentially stranded

in the wrong part of the globe for what it actually is doing, what it actually is up to,

are even more important. But Australia took the step of essentially imprisoning every,

banning anyone who's not an Australian from coming into Australia

and simultaneously imprisoning or returning Australians in hotels.

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