OPINION

Life is better in South Africa

David Bullard writes on why some people are now revisiting their emigration plans

OUT TO LUNCH

A couple of young friends of mine were thinking of emigrating to Australia back in 2019. They had reluctantly decided (having, I suspect, been fashionably white ANC supporters since the great rainbow miracle of 1994) that Pres Frogboiler wasn’t perhaps the man to lead us to a new dawn and that the future of the country looked increasingly bleak under his leadership. It’s not that the Frogboiler isn’t a good guy. He is, and he is a smooth talker and delightful company I’m told.

But he’s also worth a conservative R6.5 bln which is no small change even in these days of austerity. This is known as FU money in less polite circles and it means that if everything goes tits up (as seems increasingly likely) Cyril could still afford even more pairs of those bright purple washing up gloves that Lindiwe favours … so yah, boo, sucks to her. Politics is a very strange affair.

This also means that the Frogboiler could personally pay all those back salaries of ANC staff at Luthuli House should he choose to do so without it making a significant dent in the Frogboiler fortunes. I mean, it’s not as if he would have to give up the Gaggenau kitchen trinkets in favour of Defy products is it? The presidential mansion overlooking the Atlantic seaboard in DA run Cape Town would never have to suffer.

But the ANC vassals remain unpaid and that may be because the party regards them as worse than useless and highly dispensable. Who knows and, quite frankly, who cares any more? We know that the criminal elite who delight in referring to themselves as ‘the ruling party’ can’t arrange the proverbial alcoholic outing in a place of fermentation any more than they can make sure the historic seat of parliament is guarded by somebody who doesn’t snooze while on duty. 

As every news week passes we are offered more and more evidence of the ANC’s unsuitability to run a Spaza store let alone an entire country. This sort of criticism was understandably dismissed as ‘racism’ way back in the late 2000’s but some twenty years later the swell of criticism has become far more multi racial and those who were pilloried by our newspapers for having such ‘unacceptable’ opinions in 2008 are now sipping malt whiskies and saying ‘told you so’.

But back to my Australian would be émigrés? Both of them well qualified and highly desirable immigrants in any country that fancies itself as a first world nation.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

They have watched with increasing horror the reaction to COVID in most parts of Australia and, more particularly, the brutal reaction of the state to lockdown protests and the enthusiasm for ‘internment camps’ for the filthy unvaxxed and decided, no thank you.

Who would want to have anything to do with, let alone live in, a country like Australia that has obviously divorced itself from any respect for personal freedoms and human rights?

Who knew that lurking beneath the ‘no worries mate, we live in the lucky country’ attitude presented to the world was a brutal state system that had more in common with North Korea than it ever did with the UK?

However, sadly, this has turned out to be true. I watched a short video clip the other day of a middle aged woman in Queensland being bullied by six Aussie cops and put in the back of a police van for not having the required documents to buy a cup of coffee. The man who took the video on his cell-phone (which went viral) kept saying that this made him ashamed to be an Australian.

I also watched an interview with Freddie Sayers on UnHerd which involved a young woman who was forcibly moved to a COVID internment camp in Australia for fourteen days even though she hadn’t tested positive for COVID. Her crime was that she had lied to the police. This you might expect in China but in Australia?

It’s a terrifying interview and the only good thing to come out of it is that the courageous Hayley Hodgson doesn’t appear to be battered and bruised. Maybe they are waiting for the next time to inflict some physical wounds on this poor young woman without some nosy journalist hanging around.  

I have visited Australia on at least five occasions over the past twenty or so years and thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I did find the locals a little bit anally retentive, particularly when it came to putting the right coloured wine bottles in the appropriate recycling bin, but on the whole they were a decent bunch and very welcoming.

Not so these days alas and I have vowed to never set foot in Australia ever again. I doubt they will miss my business but I cannot, in good conscience, visit a country that gets so turned on by the idea of complete control of its citizens by decidedly lacklustre politicians. Hopefully decent Australians will rise up and sort this mess out, either by democratic or dramatic means. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Of course, much the same applies to several European countries whose equally lacklustre politicians appear to be re-discovering their not so deeply buried fascist DNA. Such is my revulsion that I won’t be visiting any of them again in the foreseeable future but I do take comfort from watching the thousands of protesters risking their lives by peacefully protesting against these lowlifes every weekend.

Meanwhile, here in SA we have much to be thankful for, despite the disastrous state of our government. In the past few weeks I have had several excellent lunches with friends at restaurants with no requirement for this absurdly nonsensical ‘vaccine passport’.

Once at the table we have whipped off our masks to eat and drink and been exposed to all the toxic aerosol exhalations of the guests at neighbouring tables.

Somehow, we have all made it through. Thankfully we don’t yet have to wave a largely meaningless piece of card to say we have been jabbed and boosted umpteen times with an experimental vaccine just to lead a normal life.

Unlike my family in the UK, I haven’t become a government sponsored hypochondriac taking four lateral flow tests a week. In fact, when I told my sister in London that I had never in 22 months been tested for COVID she was incredulous. Since I have never felt at all ill I have never seen the point of testing but maybe I am one of those selfish super-spreaders out to kill your granny.

What the past 22 months have taught us is that the ‘experts’, however well meaning, have been consistently wide of the mark with their predictions of death and destruction. That would have been forgivable if any conflicting scientific views had been allowed to be heard and not banned by the mainstream media.

Some of those conflicting views may well have been heavily loaded with conspiracy theory and exaggeration but how would we all be able to judge if we were only permitted to hear the official narrative?

The major casualty of the COVID pandemic globally though has been what is widely termed the ‘main stream media’; the vaccine zealot shills who have obediently parroted the official narrative, banned voices of dissent (from many well qualified sources who have nothing to gain but everything to lose) and come up with all sorts of threats and insults for people who may still have enough intelligence to decide for themselves whether or not they feel a COVID vaccination is a good idea.

In fact, it is the fake news main stream media who have probably done more to put the vaccine hesitant off the whole idea of getting a vaccine thanks to their bullying and biased reporting.

Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist I might think that was part of the whole plan. And, who knows, maybe it is. One thing is certain though….. the integrity of the main stream media will never be taken seriously again.

*****

While we are on the subject of integrity it does seem as though Dr Anthony Fauci, the somewhat sinister chief medical adviser to the President of the United States, has quite a few questions to answer on a whole range of topics concerning alleged misinformation over the COVID pandemic and personal links with the Wuhan research lab that has been blamed for getting the whole pandemic show on the road.

Now it may well be that Dr Fauci is totally blameless, has never benefitted financially and only has the well being of the American public in mind when he dispenses his wisdom concerning the right way to deal with COVID. We are frequently ordered by the media to ‘trust the science’ and as Dr Fauci has reminded us on several occasions, he is the science. Or at any rate, the only science you can trust.

However, what I find odd is that Dr Fauci is now 81 years old and one might have thought that a nation of some 330 million people could have found somebody less geriatric, more people friendly and less dogmatic to get the public health message across.

Odder still is that, with all the flak he attracts (much of it from senior politicians and well qualified medics) one might have expected an old timer like Fauci to opt for a rocking chair on the porch and a quieter life. Unless, of course, he is in possession of highly sensitive and potentially damaging information concerning the origin of COVID-19.