Does Australia Need a Gulag ?

We live in a very disobedient age  !  Thousands of Australians took to the streets in defiance of both court orders and pleas from the health providers when they deemed the " Black lives matter " crusade took preference over stopping the spread of the coronavirus.

Now we are shocked to hear that one in four of the people who have come in contact with the virus and been ordered to undergo a period of isolation are not obeying that instruction.  We are seeing suspicious new clusters appearing in the community that can not be attributed to a known source and when police and army personnel started  making house calls to check, an alarming number of supposedly isolated people could not be located.

Obeying that isolation rule is both a moral and a legal requirement, but implementing it is more bluff than substance.  A fine of a thousand dollars is unenforcible on someone who lives from one paycheck to another and has virtually no assets.  In fact, time in prison is still the option employed by the state debt office when all other means of collecting the money have failed.

In the early stages of this pandemic, people returning to Australia from overseas and testing positive to the virus were held in hotels at government expense.  That has changed, and now such detainees will be presented with the bill when their isolation period ends.  It will be interesting to learn what procedure swings into place for those unable to settle that bill  ?

Requiring offenders who break isolation orders to serve a prison sentence is also an option not likely to be widely employed.  Our prisons are overcrowded and offer an opportunity for the coronavirus to spread like wildfire, and there would be justified retribution if the authorities knowingly placed infected offenders amongst the very prisoners they are charged with protecting.

Many overseas authoritarian  regimes impose control over the masses by the use of what we term " gulags ".   Usually this operates entirely outside of the regular court system and offenders against the edicts of the government simply disappear and find themselves contained in these work camps for an indeterminate period of years.   The brutality and harshness varies from country to country but they are greatly feared.   Break the social isolation code and you get whisked off to the Gulag.  They have no place in our democratic way of life.

That does present the various governments of Australia with the quandary of what to do with citizens who simply refuse to live by the civil code and obey an instruction to remain at home for a set period until infection from the coronavirus abates.  Their disobedience can have the outcome of spreading the disease and it is inevitable that some such victims will die an unpleasant and painful death.

In earlier centuries such offenders might have been put in the stocks in a public place where they would be shamed by being pelted with rubbish and rotten fruit, but that form of punishment has long gone out of fashion.  Willfully spreading a deadly disease is a social crime that seems to be awaiting the displeasure of the masses  !