> However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates.

I think geography is doing the bulk of the lifting. Being on a sparsely populated island helps a whole lot.

86% of the population is urban, so it is only sparsely populated on average; there are plenty of opportunities for a disease to spread. Their relative isolation and the fact that they effectively closed their borders (so hard that even Australian citizens had a hard time getting in) before covid made it in has indeed helped with their "success." They have also had very hard (but short) lock downs whenever a case was detected in order to trace contacts.

Right, but "closing borders" is dramatically easier when you're an island. You have formal ports of entry, your infrastructure is set up such that you have a cargo ship unloading at a port and then someone else drives the cargo to its destination. Consider, for example, goods produced in Poland and delivered to central Germany--there's no neat handoff between different delivery personnel at the border, unlike at a shipping port. Further, consider how many millions of people live on one side of a European, Asian, or American border and work on another side--how many Australians commute outside of Australia in their daily commutes or vice versa?

oh Australians really like rules.

so when lockdowns come out we (especially in the west) just loved going into lockdown and dishing shit on those that flouted the rules. its a weird dichotomy that we're very easy going and freedom loving yet also love rules and enforcing them.

Yeah nah.

I will criticise the government and their laws, be skeptical, be very vocal about my privacy rights etc.

But when it comes to covid, the restrictions make sense, and I agree with the goal for which they are deployed to meet, which is reduce spread, hospitalisation, and death.

So do I like rules? No. Do I want to stop the spread? Yes. It's that simple.