Oh yeah Melbourne screwed up badly. But the rest of the country didn't. Don't conflate Melbourne's bad contact tracing and subsequent lockdowns with the quality of life elsewhere in Australia. We spent most of the last two years COVID free and without lockdowns. Even Sydney contact-traced their way out of multiple outbreaks before July 2021 without lockdowns.
It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.
Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4]
After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5]
With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-offi...
[3] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-...
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arres...
[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-...