Australia has various advantages as an island continent. It is monumental and only accessible in the most impractical ways. It is discouragingly far and almost impossible to invade without a huge investment of personnel and material. The decision to place convicts on the island by the British was audaciously cruel and illogical, setting a precedent for future decisions by Australian governments to send undesirables to distant, inaccessible outposts, at cost.
But distance has not spared the country from the COVID-19 pandemic. Assisted by human error and misjudgement, quarantine defences were breached as they will no doubt continue to be. In Victoria, it proved most costly, leading to community transmission in a deadly second wave with a single-day peak of 725 cases in August. In the largest state in the country, New South Wales, pride was taken at developing a contact tracing system to deal with arrivals from outside Australia. Withering judgment, notably by the Morrison federal government, was cast on hapless Victoria. New South Wales received gushing praise.