[P]reventing citizens from leaving or entering their nation, banning them from leaving their homes or destroying their means of income is a civil liberties issue and, although it might be the right solution, it needs questioning and more consistent and transparent data than is offered at the moment.
What it "needs" is a price put on it. Dollars. Along with the price of the mental and physical and mental health issues, suicides, and plain old economic loss. Dollars.
The dollars might be an estimate, but at the moment there is not even that.
Whether the approach taken to Covid 19 is "the right solution" depends on how much it really costs.
The approach being taken at the moment is to 'throw everything' at the virus, irrespective of the cost (though it would have been nice if the Federal government had thrown money at proper quarantine facilities earlier, when it was durr-obvious they were needed). Covid 19 is 'public enemy number 1' and it's being fought no matter the cost. No price is put on the value of the lives saved.
But why, then, don't we shut down the roads, permanently, to prevent the loss of life in road accidents? Our political 'leaders' won't say it, but the reason is because the consequential costs to society of shutting the roads down would far outweigh the value of the lives that would be saved.
Maybe a life lost on the road is less valuable than a life lost to Covid 19?
The response to Covid 19 reminds me a lot of aviation safety regulation in Australia.
Our political 'leaders' have abdicated their responsibilities to technical - in this case medical - experts. The medical experts have been asked how to fight Covid 19 and our 'leaders' have 'acted on the medical advice'.
The medical experts have not been asked for - because they couldn't tell you - an estimate of the cost of fighting Covid 19 in the way they've recommended. Estimating the value of curtailed liberties, the value of the physical and mental health impacts of those locked down or restricted in travel, the businesses and livelihoods lost and just plain old economic activity, is not their job. The medical experts might 'care' about those costs, in the sense that they'd prefer the costs not be paid, but it's not the medical experts' job to decide whether or not the costs should be paid in return for following their recommended approach to mitigating Covid 19 risks. That's supposed to be the job of our 'leaders'.
Ask CASA for the real costs of, for example, the 'community service flight' changes. CASA wouldn't know and doesn't care. It's moved risks out of the air to 'somewhere else' where 'someone else' will pay the price.
Still, all of the economic numbers are great. Record house prices, low unemployment, GDP and inflation numbers looking good. Perhaps what Australia should keep doing indefinitely, and irrespective of Covid 19, is randomly locking down cities, randomly shutting down interstate and international borders and going the odd trillion or so into further debt). What could possibly go wrong?