A Qantas Mask Story
On playing poker with The Evil Leprechaun...and winning.
I went to Melbourne recently.
Melbourne was once the most liveable city in the world for seven years straight. Whenever my wife and I used to go down there from Sydney we’d always say that we could easily live there.
No more.
Today Melbourne is the woke capital of Australia and the posterchild for Democratic Dictatorship. More on that another time…maybe.
You are required to wear a mask in the airport and obviously on the plane. I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to be bullied into wearing a face nappy for hours at a time by our own Evil Leprechaun (credit to Paul Collits) and Qantas CEO Allan Joyce.
On a related side note, the Evil Leprechaun has done very nicely for himself during Covid, recently spending $19m on a home while at the same time terminating staff for not getting injected.
Back to masks…
I wrote in depth about Mask Strategy in Feb 2022.
An excerpt:
A recap on the mechanics of an exemption in NSW.
First let’s look at the Public Health Order in NSW (Australia) and specifically at who DOESN’T need to wear a mask.
Public Health (COVID-19 General) Order (No 2) 2021 (nsw.gov.au)
Exceptions for certain persons
(1) A person is not required to wear a fitted face covering if the person
(a) has a physical or mental health illness or condition, or disability, that makes wearing a fitted face covering unsuitable, and
(b) carries evidence showing
(i) that the person has the illness, condition or disability, and
(ii) the illness, condition or disability makes wearing a fitted face covering unsuitable, and
(iii) the person’s name and place of residence, and
(c) produces the evidence for inspection if requested to do so by a police officer.
(2) Evidence for the purposes of subclause (1)(b)(i) and (ii) must be in the form of—
(a) a medical certificate or other written evidence signed by a registered health practitioner or a registered NDIS provider within the meaning of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 of the Commonwealth, or
(b) a statutory declaration by the person.
So, what this says is that you have to wear a mask…except when you don’t.
In summary, you don’t need to wear a mask if you have a physical condition (makes breathing difficult etc) that makes wearing it unsuitable. You need evidence (papers) to prove this, which is a self-declaration.
So, let’s look at this again; You have to wear a mask unless you declare that you cannot wear a mask. Get it?
One of the morals of this story is to simply READ the rules of the game in your jurisdiction. Don’t just rely on a health department to tell you what the rules are and summarise them for you as they lie by omission ALL THE TIME in their “summaries”.
Once you know the rules then you can devise a strategy to combat the system and play to win.
I arrived at the airport with my Statutory Declaration ready.
I walked up to a Qantas “service” woman asking her where I might find the Help Desk. She, being full masked, actually took a full step back and away from me making sure there was the scientifically correct distance between us, beyond the known travelling range of the virus, then once in her safe zone she asked me to put a mask on.
I then served her my tried and tested line, by now delivered with empathy and perfect timing:
“I would love to, but I can’t, I have a legal exemption.”
Oh, OK, she said, then she told me that since Covid they don’t have a Help Desk anymore, but why was I asking? I told her I wanted to have Qantas add my mask exemption into my profile so that if I am harassed (yes, I used that word) by anyone I could show them my boarding pass and they would leave me alone.
She said nobody is likely to ask you and if they do, just tell them you have an exemption, and they will be fine. I didn’t quite believe here but that’s all I had to work with.
And so it was that I entered the airport, and through security and the food court and the boarding area and through boarding and onto the plane…and NOBODY asked me for a mask…interesting. I was the only person on the plane without a mask (that I could see).
Let’s just say that I was expecting a lot more friction, including from some zealot citizenry but alas there wasn’t any. Even the flight attendants were pleasant without any passive aggression, well as much as I could tell without seeing their full facial expression.
During the whole plane experience Qantas mentioned 5-6 times through recorded messages or live announcements that a mask had to be worn at all times and that it needed to cover your nose properly and that you were “allowed” to remove it “briefly” when eating. A suffocating, menacing environment created by the Evil Leprechaun to maximise compliance…and it worked, but for one passenger.
My favourite announcement was one recorded that said, and I paraphrase:
Should you need to use the emergency oxygen, “you are permitted” to remove your mask.
How absolutely understanding of them.
Ok, that was the first leg of the trip.
On return from Melbourne, this time I went to the (wo)manned station positioned at the centre of a collection of self-serve check-in stations. I told the lady about my exemption and that I’d like it added to my profile, she didn’t ask for proof, and brought up my profile and typed in that I had a mask exemption…voila…she then printed my boarding pass with the magic words on it.
I went through security, food court, bookstore, boarding area…
On a side note, while in the bookstore I noticed this magazine cover.
Look at the three titles on the right:
Climate: blaming the moon this time
Pharma: Anti-obesity drug promo
Wokeism: Gender dysphoria among apes
The onslaught on people’s minds is total. It’s not just the government and media propaganda machine but even a seemingly “safe space” like a science mag will not let you wander from “the great narratives”. It’s basically impossible for the overwhelming majority to free their minds from this total, totalitarian, new “reality”.
Back to my story…
…and the first person to say anything was the zealous Qantas employee checking boarding passes before we went onboard. He asked me to put my mask on, at which point you know what I said:
“I would love to, but I can’t, I have a legal exemption.”
Except this time, I presented my boarding pass as I said it and he saw the magic words printed on it.
“Oh, ok, welcome on board sir”.
Nobody on board said a word, again, from what I could see, I was the only one on board without a mask.
So, one question on the way, and one question on return…a fraction of the friction and turbulence (pun intended) that I was expecting and ready for.
I’m reading The Gulag Archipelago at the moment (finally!!), the abridged edition with a most wonderful forward by Jordan Peterson. There’s a great line that jumped up at me the other day:
A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.
In my mask strategy stack, I said it another way:
If this is a war, and it is, we need to develop the disagreeable part of our nature.
It doesn’t mean we need to set out to argue with everybody, but it means we need to practice and develop being comfortable sitting with the psychological tension of “possibly” having an argument.
That’s what it means to develop the disagreeable part of our personality. Many people lean towards being naturally agreeable and conflict avoiding, that’s fair enough, but the world has changed and, as I have written before, the border and the territory between you and the State is being reset, and if you are to have any chance of defending some of that personal territory, you need to start training the disagreeable part of you to be comfortable with “the possibility” of some confrontation.
I’m reminded of the “first follower” clip from many years back.
It applies here.
The “movement” the clip is referring to is simply the mechanics of internal decision making and the calculus that says, “the risk to me has been reduced to an acceptable point”.
The pathway to that calculus is the “first follower” or more simply the “second person”.
In this story, I was the first person, but I just as easily could have been the second person. For everybody also, once they see two, three, or four people on a plane not wearing a mask the “risk to me” calculus starts changing dramatically.
The point here is not to underestimate your impact on a “movement”, if you don’t want to be the first crazy person, how about being the second or the third…it doesn’t take much to help others give themselves “permission to take some risk”.
What are masks about by now?
Well, one aspect of it for commercial enterprises such as Woolworths (yes, I’m looking at you Banducci) and The Flying Australian Slaver, sorry I meant Kangaroo, is that they are “choosing” to respond to what is fairly described as a psychotic loud minority.
Eugyppius brought German lunatic “science reporter” Christina Berndt to my attention with this piece, and I quote her:
Lifting the mandates, though, will surely lead to fewer and fewer people filtering their breath. Wearing a mask will then become a symbol of fear or weakness. Mask-wearing, though, is more than a sign that you don’t want to catch the virus. It’s an expression of solidarity. It would be nice if many people showed such solidarity. Freedom is good. But freedom without responsibility is not freedom at all, merely egoism.
And on that note, please show far less “solidarity” and far more “egoism” as you go about your day.
P.S. This arrived yesterday :)
The exemption is the same as it is in NZ. Self declared and you're not required to tell anyone why you have the exemption. Still run into the occasional zealot though, who thinks they have the right to the last 30 years of your medical history.
Being prepared for the possibility of a confrontation is exactly right. That’s how I felt walking through the shopping mall without a mask. People looking at me and I’m wondering why, is it strange seeing someone’s whole face, are they aghast that I dare to walk around maskless spreading Covid everywhere, do they secretly wish they had no mask on? But inside I’m thinking, come on, ask me. Rehearsing what I’ll say. I just smiled openly at everyone and I hoped my eyes were saying, come on, you can too.