It's hard to evaluate what this means without knowing, at least, the demographic make up of your part of the world, the vaccination rates, the vaccination kinetics, and health system capacity and access.

I could equally cherry pick places with more disastrous outcomes as a counterargument eg Italy early on.

Nevertheless, I'm envious of your lack of restrictions. I haven't seen my father for a long time.

Sorry that you haven’t seen your father that is a bummer. Not cherry picking literally describing the town and school system where I live.

Hospitals are busier with an uptick in covid patients however they are not overwhelmed.

The low vaccination rate means it takes little for cases to jump from double to triple or even quadruple digits, at which point things spiral out of control like already happened in many other countries. Compare this to countries like Britain or the US with high vaccination rates and even higher percentages of the population with antibodies.

Where is that? How many tests are being conducted per day? What is the population?

35/45 are meaningless numbers without any context.

35 students out of 2,645 total.

Tests are only conducted on exposed students (confirmed to be in close contact with positive case)or symptomatic students.

Students are not the only members of a community or geographic area.

I’m unclear how this is a relevant comparison to “Covid in Australia” or “lockdown strategy” beyond ‘smaller numbers are smaller’

If you are going to compare the numbers you just provided (which are not a good direct comparison), then it shows that it’s considerably more out of control in your school than in NSW, which is the least contained outbreak in Australia.

26k active cases in 8.1M population. Approx 0.3%.

35 in 2645 is 1.3%.

Other states of Australia are considerably better. So again, what is your point?

Sometimes in Western Australia I forget covid is happening if I don't check the news. Brief, sweet moments. We haven't been in a lockdown longer than 3 days in quite some time.