Originally Posted by
aviation_enthus
Yes that’s the (sometimes) benefit of being not a democracy. Same way China could do things no one else can get away with (dealing with the virus anyway).
UAE do well in a few areas due to this “advantage”. But that’s only because they are blessed with a reasonable leadership that actually want their country to succeed.
Australia hasn’t done a bad job. Never said otherwise. But Australia has the massive advantage of being an island that is relatively self sufficient. The relative advantages of individual countries should dictate strategy. The only countries Australians should be comparing themselves to are Singapore, NZ, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. All are islands (or effectively so in S Korea case). I wouldn’t count the UK in this list as it’s directly connected to France (Chunnel) and is highly dependent on traffic to/from the continent.
That being said I’ll take the problems of a democracy over a benevolent dictatorship long term thanks. They do well when the leadership is good, much harder to change if the leadership is rubbish.
The advantage of being an island nation is the relative ease of controlling international travel.
Controlling ingress of potentially virulent arrivals is the key.
The UK is not exempt from this advantage. And the Chunnel is a poor excuse for not implementing effective movement controls.
Singapore has no Chunnel but it does have a causeway.
And ALL are highly dependent international trade.
In a sense you might even consider Western Australia an island within an island.
We have our Chunnel (the Nullabor highway) but it has been the effective (possibly Draconian and admittedly not perfect) implementation of border controls that has kept WA free of Covid in the wild for the last nine months.
You can't have it both ways.