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Like many people, I wished the very worst upon the anti-lockdown protesters in Sydney. I wished they would catch the disease they seemed to think was little more than an illusion. A mask-less rabble in their thousands, they marched down Broadway: new-age anti-vaxxers, angry gym junkies, Christians fixated on the apocalypse, rednecks waving their flags for liberty, whole swathes of people who have lost all faith in the media and politicians. Placards on display declared the ABC to be controlled by Zionists, while others talked of not wanting to be part of a vaccine Holocaust.
It was hard to know who was freedom-loving or freedom-threatening, who was pagan or religious, lost in conspiracies or enraged by their inability to believe in anything at all. But a mob does not channel thought; only ill will.
Thousands of people march through Sydney on Saturday. Credit:Rhett Wyman
The story of a nurse on her way to work being abused by the crowd for wearing a mask and a photo of large, muscular man seeming to strike a police horse summed it up. The man’s singlet said “Free Speech – more important than your feelings”. Later we learnt the horse was OK and that his name, appropriately enough, was Tobruk.
Apart from contradictory appeals for freedom, the only unifying chant the protesters had was “New South Wales”, as if this whole anti-lockdown event was woven from a State of Origin NRL fan-base mired in a reality-TV update on Survivor.
Watching footage on the news, I saw the anti-lockdown protesters as vectors for disease, threatening my life and that of my family and my world, guaranteeing an extension of the lockdown and a likely intensification of its guidelines.
Then other signals started pushing through the resentful static. People on social media began posting, “To just to save time and unnecessary effort – if you were in the march today or even support it, please unfriend me now.” Lots of ‘Likes’ and laughs and dummy spits followed. I joined in, but as it spread, I became aware of a riff of condescension that coloured such posts. We better men and women were divorcing ourselves from “the deplorables”. I began to feel a little sick.
A man strikes a police horse during an anti-lockdown protest in Sydney on Saturday.Credit:Brook Mitchell
Watching the news, reporters spoke of being threatened by the crowd. Evidence included marchers shouting at a television crew “you’re the enemy”. The tone was one of genuine hatred – and revelry. Alienated and humiliated, these were people easily inspired by lunatics and nastier forces, by anyone offering them a meaning or recognition.
Rolling vox-pop grabs caught marchers saying “$600 is not enough”, a reference to the federal government’s weekly COVID-19 disaster payment for people who have lost more than 20 hours’ work during lockdown.
The fact is the lockdowns across south-west Sydney are more severely enforced than in the city, shuttering main streets and businesses and stopping the movement of many people who do not have the privilege or ability to work from home on a laptop. The tale of a divided city.
This same tale pits the multicultural service corridors of the south-west against the elites of the inner city, while also propelling Bondi anti-vaxxers to join forces with Bankstown tradies. Alliances hardly make sense; enmities spring from wells of confusion. Of course, all that resentment is a manifestation of issues around class, ethnicity and poverty. Postcode hatred amped by the plague. Shades of what happened in America when a mob stormed the Capitol come into view. You start to worry.
Fairfield faces a more severe lockdown than most of Sydney.Credit:Brook Mitchell
The pressures on our health system are taking it to the brink, while our federal government cuts away at Medicare and sidesteps the failure of its vaccine rollout. The unemployment lines, the tilt deeper into casualisation and diminished labour rights have outlined endemic problems to people who once had job security, but don’t any more.
For years, advocates have sounded alarm about the fact essential workers were struggling to find affordable housing near their work and were being pushed further west. The outrageous boom in real estate prices and the high cost of Sydney rents, moderated rather than softened during this pandemic, has kept the monkey on people’s backs.
We see signs of a rotten system where inequality has been allowed to thrive like some invisible creature that has suddenly emerged. It makes the shock and horror over the anti-lockdown freedom march feel like cheap righteousness.Unfortunately, I think this eruption is just the start.
It asks, urgently, what kind of society we need to create in the wake of COVID-19, the Delta variant and the strains that will surely follow. There is no going back to “normal”. Without a vision as far reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal we are in danger of a very ugly transformation. A world where people turn to the cracked mirror of their social media news feeds and ask with increasing malice, “You talking to me?”
Mark Mordue is a Sydney writer and journalist.
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