To my eyes, Melbourne’s turned weird. Is this a lingering legacy of long lockdowns?

After 245 days of lockdown, during which Victorians were isolated by public health order, the state has congealed into a new social reality. During a visit to Melbourne last week, the first in quite a while, a vibe shift struck me. Melburnians have changed. Former Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton, interviewed this week on the Neil Mitchell Asks Why podcast, believes we need to take the time to learn the lessons of the pandemic and how it affected citizens.

The weather was familiar as I stepped out of my hotel – the icy bite of an Antarctic wind with a dash of “might turn sunny”. Instead, it rained. The Melbourne weather gods like to keep their playthings guessing.

There was a whiff of nihilism as I headed down to Bourke St Mall, with some older teens spraying tags on the windows of empty shops. Just a little further, a small group dressed in black with their mouths taped shut, surrounded by bloody images of animals, to promote veganism.

Melbourne’s weekly pro-Palestine march has morphed into an omni-protest. The protesters straggled down the tram line, blocking commuters, led by a man in military camouflage gear, with his head wrapped and face obscured by a black and white keffiyeh. He was waving a large Palestinian flag. The crowd chanted “intifada, intifada”. The meaning of the word is contested – protesters claim they are using it in its literal sense of “shaking off”, or resistance. Students of the Middle East recognise that past “intifadas” have always been characterised by violence.

But if intifada was this crowd’s purpose, they had a limited attention span for it. The chant soon segued into “always was, always will be Aboriginal land”, then “why are you shopping?” (Because a flashy new make-up store has just opened up on the strip, I thought. Obviously. And then as the chant cycled into “free, free Palestine”, I allowed myself to enjoy the irony that I’d just come from Mecca.)

On my way back to the hotel, clutching my purchases, I was accosted by some kind of new age mob, who wanted to press their flyers into my free hand. Victoria has turned weird. It has a cultish vibe.

The state is also the epicentre of Australia’s neo-Nazi movement. New Zealand-born organiser Thomas Sewell grew up here; over the past few years, his followers have staged marches in Ballarat and Bendigo, as well as gatecrashing a women’s rights rally held in the Melbourne CBD. On Australia Day 2024, they made a long weekend boys’ trip of interstate hate by travelling to Sydney and a couple of weeks ago, they managed to look national with the March for Australia, but fundamentally, they remain a small Melbourne phenomenon trying to make themselves seem big.

According to people who knew him, Dezi Freeman, the so-called sovereign citizen who allegedly killed two police officers executing a warrant on him in August, also disappeared down a rabbit hole during the pandemic. The hardware store owner in his town, when interviewed by The Age, blamed the pandemic. “He was a f---ing nutter,” he said, “It was COVID – it sent everyone nuts.”

Speaking to Neil Mitchell, Sutton was circumspect about commenting on the psychological effect of public health orders, including those that had shut down playgrounds and prevented children from socialising with their peers.

But Sutton hinted that it might be connected to a concerning youth crime wave. “My suspicion,” he told Mitchell, “and this is a personal view, is that there’s a larger global trend with youth that was maybe amplified through COVID-19 with all the challenges that it presented.”

Data from Victoria’s Crime Statistics Authority released on Thursday show that young offenders are significantly over-represented in serious and violent crimes. Despite comprising only 12.8 per cent of offenders, they accounted for 66.2 per cent of robberies, 47.7 per cent of aggravated burglaries and 26.4 per cent of car thefts.

It remains controversial to use the term “youth crime gang” in Victoria due to a recurring political stoush over whether young people of shared ethnicity were committing crimes together, but the Victorian police do note the fact that a sense of belonging is part of the youth crime wave story. “For some young people,” the Victorian police website says, “a shared identity built around crime and violence results in an escalating pattern of gang-related offending.“

Not everyone is open to the idea that lockdowns were a bad thing. Sutton’s face was printed on pillows and bedsheets by eager fans. He was, as Mitchell puts to him, something of a sex symbol. Sutton is clearly uncomfortable with the description, moving the conversation instead to the dynamic that created the passion. “You know, in a crisis, people go to various extremes and there were extremes of hatred and there were extremes of adulation.” Perhaps one of the first cults to form in Victoria as a result of COVID was Suttondom.

The pandemic created the perfect conditions for all kinds of cults to recruit at scale. Isolated people become vulnerable and open to new communities that seem to offer purpose. Something in the spirit of this state was broken and it is now fusing back together in a jagged and disturbing shape.

The government’s official pandemic review was completed at the end of last year, but without a recognition of the long-term effects of measures, it cannot truly be considered complete.

This is not just another piece of Sydney versus Melbourne rivalry; it’s a call to better investigate what lockdowns here, there and everywhere wrought. Sutton, now a director of the CSIRO, believes the world is facing hard times ahead. “A pandemic might be part of the juggernaut,” he says.

Sutton believes more needs to be done to assess Victoria’s hardline reaction. Only by scrutinising both the necessity and the consequences of those decisions can we begin to understand how a crisis altered not just policy but people. Without that reckoning, Victoria risks staying trapped in its distorted new shape. In the next pandemic, the world may follow.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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