10 ms·

Perth man jailed for 7 months after breaching self-quarantine instructions

32 points by mrfusion 5y ago

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
I clicked the article expecting some floridaman type story full of shenanigans and aggravating circumstances but nope, he just had some contractors over to do work and had some people over to buy stuff via classifieds. The latter doesn't even require them to come into your house or get within any appreciable distance of you. I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion enabling the judge to dish out this kind of sentence (and judges tend not to take thumbing one's nose at state authority very well) but it's not like he threw a party or invited his buddies over for dinner or something, heck, there's not even a mention of this guy having a prior record. Any aggravating factor I could see leading to this kind of sentence (like getting in a fight with the arresting officers and the majority of the time being for that violation) is simply absent.
- smt88 5y ago
  Having contractors over to do work is a great way to spread a disease. The classifieds buyers are less of a big deal, but having shades of gray is probably unenforceable for any law like this. Like how do you decide what is an acceptable violation of quarantine? Who decides? Who pays them to spend a lot of time deciding?
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  I was wondering around a Sydney suburb (somewhere across the bay from city center) and came across a dresser somebody had dumped on the sidewalk—something you’d see a dozen times a day in any American city, rich or poor neighborhood. An enforcement agency had slapped a sticker on it warning about jail time if the perpetrator was caught. Harsh, perhaps, but it was the only junk furniture I saw in two weeks.
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    There are periodic bulk waste collection times where you can put out large furniture like that. People (both individuals and junk dealers) will go around collecting anything good. At the end of the week, the council collects what is left free of charge. Outside of those times, it is illegal dumping. You don't see much of it because there is legal and free pick up available.
    - ericbarrett 5y ago
      Well sure, that’s how it works in most Western cities—the cost and service vary, of course. Never seen the jail time threat though.
      - goodcanadian 5y ago
        Sydney is the only place I have seen where it was a free, regularly scheduled, community event where everyone's stuff (in a particular area) went out at the same time and could be freely picked up thus diverting it from the landfill. The leftovers were then picked up by the council free of charge.
        ericbarrett 5y ago
        A lot of American cities have a “bulk waste amnesty day” which is similar.
- giarc 5y ago
  Imagine you are a tradesperson and get hired for some job. You go to the house, complete the work, only to later find out the owner of the house (who was there the whole time) was legally required to self-isolate due to risk of having COVID. How would you feel? What if the tradesperson lived with elderly parents or had kids or someone they were in touch with that was high risk?
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    What if they found out before, not later? The story doesn't say he failed to inform. In fact, it was someone whom he informed who informed on him.
    - giarc 5y ago
      People don't get to make the rules.
      - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
        He's being accused of endangerment by the GP comment, which assumes he lied and omitted his status. That's speculation and has nothing to do with the law he supposedly broke.
        readflaggedcomm 5y ago
        I guess stating facts is beyond the pale.
        giarc 5y ago
        I said people don't get to make the rules referring to your comment about what if the homeowner informed the tradesperson first. Well that's the thing, you can't break the rules just because everyone is in agreement that it's ok. There were many documented parties that occurred during the pandemic and just because everyone was aware they were breaking rules, doesn't make it legal.
- underseacables 5y ago
  I couldn’t agree more, this is some serious judicial overreach bordering bordering on cruelty. Based on the recent discussion here about vaccination discrimination, I worry we are headed in a direction for much of the rest where you will be arrested if you leave the house unvaccinated.
  - mickotron 5y ago
    These are emergency powers assumed under a pandemic, settle down now.
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  I never found Australia to have particularly strict law enforcement in general. However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates. I think geography is doing the bulk of the lifting. Being on a sparsely populated island helps a whole lot.
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      86% of the population is urban, so it is only sparsely populated on average; there are plenty of opportunities for a disease to spread. Their relative isolation and the fact that they effectively closed their borders (so hard that even Australian citizens had a hard time getting in) before covid made it in has indeed helped with their "success." They have also had very hard (but short) lock downs whenever a case was detected in order to trace contacts.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        Right, but "closing borders" is dramatically easier when you're an island. You have formal ports of entry, your infrastructure is set up such that you have a cargo ship unloading at a port and then someone else drives the cargo to its destination. Consider, for example, goods produced in Poland and delivered to central Germany--there's no neat handoff between different delivery personnel at the border, unlike at a shipping port. Further, consider how many millions of people live on one side of a European, Asian, or American border and work on another side--how many Australians commute outside of Australia in their daily commutes or vice versa?
  - senectus1 5y ago
    oh Australians really like rules. so when lockdowns come out we (especially in the west) just loved going into lockdown and dishing shit on those that flouted the rules. its a weird dichotomy that we're very easy going and freedom loving yet also love rules and enforcing them.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Australia took quarantine really seriously. The plus side: less than a thousand deaths, hospitality mostly open, very few short lockdowns. The downside is that the lockdowns that do happen are very heavy, and anyone breaching them is treated like a smoker in a fireworks factory.
  - psychedelican 5y ago
    The deaths and despair from lockdowns far surpass those created from COVID alone. I bet missed cancer screenings alone have caused more than a thousand deaths in Australia.
    - senectus1 5y ago
      This is such an unfounded skynews hyperbolic sort of comment. In no way could you provide any sort of facts for this statement.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      You’re comparing mismatched quantities. You should be comparing how many would have died and how much despair would be caused in the absence of the lockdown. Consider this hypothetical: a pandemic solution which completely eliminates the disease while causing exactly 1 premature death. The death and despair from the solution far surpasses that of the disease itself, with infinity percent more death! This is clearly not a useful metric. In the case of COVID, everywhere had some kind of pandemic response, but the least effective so far is Peru with 5982.3 deaths per million population, vs Australia’s 36 per million. Multiply by population, and the difference between the Peruvian and Australian fatality rate indicates Australia saved 152 thousand people. That’s the number of Australian residents you need to suspect have fatally missed a cancer screening. Caveat: it ain’t over ‘till it’s over, and the Iron Pyrite medal for highest death toll can always change hands. Edit: decimal point off by one
- bmsleight_ 5y ago
  If I invited a contractor into my home and I knew there was say exposed live electricity wires. Even if the contractors was not damaged - I should be prosecuted. So he exposed someone to a risk that was avoidable. Any other Health and Safety risk, would have been prosecuted in the same way (in the UK not Australia). [CDM regulations]
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Or he informed them ahead of time and they took the risk on their own.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  A country that has single-digit cases and is desperately trying to get it back to zero will necessarily and justifiedly have much stricter quarantine rules. Safety wise, this is comparable to randomly firing a bullet at an occupied building. Most likely the bullet will miss (the guy won't be infected/won't infect), but if you get really unlucky (someone gets infected and spreads it before that connection can be discovered), the results are disastrous (and deadly - COVID still has a 1% IFR as far as I know).
  - breck 5y ago
    I think you’re off by orders of magnitudes. Maybe build a model first and get back to us?
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    The case numbers were 99 yesterday, so yes, double digit, but it’s not good. Australia locked down, but from a New Zealand perspective their lockdowns have been rather less harsh than ours. Supermarkets and medical practices (for humans and animals) were all we had open. It has seemed that their way got the results while having more shops open, though they are in a tight spot right now.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    This story isn't enough to gauge safety. We don't know who wasn't vaccinated or when he informed visitors of his quarantine status.
  - ipspam 5y ago
    The IFR, depending on whom you believe, was always in the 0.23-0.7% range. The CFR is a worthless junk statistic for estimating risk to the individual and is only of use for managing services. Whether it is lower now or not is more a philosophical question as empirical, the IFR has been demolished by vaccinating the elderly. This can be taken two ways.... Either that Covid was never a risk to most people to begin with and only appeared deadly because of those close to death, OR Vaccines have saved us. Either way, the CFR in Briton of the Delta Variant is 0.13%, for the unvaccinated that number is 0.08% A reasonable IFR rate would be close to half those rates (in my opinion, as that is unknowable) https://archive.is/Um0V9 https://archive.is/Um0V9
- Derek_Mudaxe 5y ago
  >I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion This made me double take. The Thirteen colonies was used as a penal colony too, so maybe the USA has expansive judicial discretion too, or maybe it's not really relevant.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Well it does have both the highest incarceration rate and highest absolute number of people incarcerated in the world.
    - Derek_Mudaxe 5y ago
      Just carrying on the tradition then I suppose.
- liminal 5y ago
  You seem to think that not following a quarantine order isn't a big deal. Others think otherwise.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  On the other hand Aus is basically covid free and has been for nearly a year. Meanwhile us Liberal brits let everyone flout the rules and we're headed into a third wave despite being over 60% vaccinated. Oh and we created at least 1 new variant. Oh and we've had a lot more disruption, lockdowns, curfews etc. Sometimes giving up some freedom now gets you a lot more freedom (and fewer dead people) in the very near future.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  > He was sentenced to seven months in prison, but can walk free after serving just two months behind bars. I don't know if you read the part where it says that he actually needs to spend only 2 months behind bars, but if you didn't, does that change your opinion?
wrycoder 5y ago
In North Korea, they just shoot them.
- amackera 5y ago
  Buddy they do that in America too
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Australians, please, vote out your leadership. The Morrison administration is the worst thing to happen to Australia in years. Absolutely incompetence, misinformation, pandering to fossil fuel industry, environmental destruction and lies. Media Watch, the ABC news program captures some of the absolute stupidity occurring down under: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssBtV3J7BBLZAuY9U5UX92mt https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssBtV3J7BBLZ... This all could have been resolved by now if Australia had decent leadership. They were offered the solution, but were so pig headed they refused it. Now they are in an even worse situation. "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." Donald Horne, 1964
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Well, now he will get a government provided "quarantine".
AlexCoventry 5y ago
I'm looking forward to Australia relaxing entry requirements on vaccinated international travelers.
anotherevan 5y ago
This article[1] has a little more detail. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783343/WA-man-sentenced-SEVEN-MONTHS-jail-failing-comply-Covid-rules.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783343/WA-man-sent... Some things to note: * There were fifteen separate incidents of quarantine breach. He also, "regularly left his house for hours at a time" during that period. * The magistrate as much as said the harshness was in-part a warning to other would-be offenders (sending a "powerful message"). Yeah, we do take quarantine pretty seriously here. Having gone through the extended lockdowns in Victoria, while our geography was advantageous, it also required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation to get back to zero community transmission. It relied on following the advice of our health experts and scientists in the face of large economic and political pressures. In Melbourne now we are enjoying reasonably normal conditions compared to B.C. (Before COVID) times. So we have a pretty low tolerance for any "dick-head" that may put that at risk. That said, I'm surprised at jail time instead of a steep monetary fine. It is a shame we pretty much squandered our gains with a very poorly handled vaccination roll-out (but that's a discussion for another time).

32 points by mrfusion 5y ago

I clicked the article expecting some floridaman type story full of shenanigans and aggravating circumstances but nope, he just had some contractors over to do work and had some people over to buy stuff via classifieds. The latter doesn't even require them to come into your house or get within any appreciable distance of you. I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion enabling the judge to dish out this kind of sentence (and judges tend not to take thumbing one's nose at state authority very well) but it's not like he threw a party or invited his buddies over for dinner or something, heck, there's not even a mention of this guy having a prior record. Any aggravating factor I could see leading to this kind of sentence (like getting in a fight with the arresting officers and the majority of the time being for that violation) is simply absent.

smt88 5y ago
Having contractors over to do work is a great way to spread a disease. The classifieds buyers are less of a big deal, but having shades of gray is probably unenforceable for any law like this. Like how do you decide what is an acceptable violation of quarantine? Who decides? Who pays them to spend a lot of time deciding?
ericbarrett 5y ago
I was wondering around a Sydney suburb (somewhere across the bay from city center) and came across a dresser somebody had dumped on the sidewalk—something you’d see a dozen times a day in any American city, rich or poor neighborhood. An enforcement agency had slapped a sticker on it warning about jail time if the perpetrator was caught. Harsh, perhaps, but it was the only junk furniture I saw in two weeks.
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  There are periodic bulk waste collection times where you can put out large furniture like that. People (both individuals and junk dealers) will go around collecting anything good. At the end of the week, the council collects what is left free of charge. Outside of those times, it is illegal dumping. You don't see much of it because there is legal and free pick up available.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    Well sure, that’s how it works in most Western cities—the cost and service vary, of course. Never seen the jail time threat though.
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      Sydney is the only place I have seen where it was a free, regularly scheduled, community event where everyone's stuff (in a particular area) went out at the same time and could be freely picked up thus diverting it from the landfill. The leftovers were then picked up by the council free of charge.
      - ericbarrett 5y ago
        A lot of American cities have a “bulk waste amnesty day” which is similar.
giarc 5y ago
Imagine you are a tradesperson and get hired for some job. You go to the house, complete the work, only to later find out the owner of the house (who was there the whole time) was legally required to self-isolate due to risk of having COVID. How would you feel? What if the tradesperson lived with elderly parents or had kids or someone they were in touch with that was high risk?
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  What if they found out before, not later? The story doesn't say he failed to inform. In fact, it was someone whom he informed who informed on him.
  - giarc 5y ago
    People don't get to make the rules.
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      He's being accused of endangerment by the GP comment, which assumes he lied and omitted his status. That's speculation and has nothing to do with the law he supposedly broke.
      - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
        I guess stating facts is beyond the pale.
      - giarc 5y ago
        I said people don't get to make the rules referring to your comment about what if the homeowner informed the tradesperson first. Well that's the thing, you can't break the rules just because everyone is in agreement that it's ok. There were many documented parties that occurred during the pandemic and just because everyone was aware they were breaking rules, doesn't make it legal.
underseacables 5y ago
I couldn’t agree more, this is some serious judicial overreach bordering bordering on cruelty. Based on the recent discussion here about vaccination discrimination, I worry we are headed in a direction for much of the rest where you will be arrested if you leave the house unvaccinated.
- mickotron 5y ago
  These are emergency powers assumed under a pandemic, settle down now.
goodcanadian 5y ago
I never found Australia to have particularly strict law enforcement in general. However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > However, they have been taking covid very seriously and have had correspondingly low infection rates. I think geography is doing the bulk of the lifting. Being on a sparsely populated island helps a whole lot.
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    86% of the population is urban, so it is only sparsely populated on average; there are plenty of opportunities for a disease to spread. Their relative isolation and the fact that they effectively closed their borders (so hard that even Australian citizens had a hard time getting in) before covid made it in has indeed helped with their "success." They have also had very hard (but short) lock downs whenever a case was detected in order to trace contacts.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Right, but "closing borders" is dramatically easier when you're an island. You have formal ports of entry, your infrastructure is set up such that you have a cargo ship unloading at a port and then someone else drives the cargo to its destination. Consider, for example, goods produced in Poland and delivered to central Germany--there's no neat handoff between different delivery personnel at the border, unlike at a shipping port. Further, consider how many millions of people live on one side of a European, Asian, or American border and work on another side--how many Australians commute outside of Australia in their daily commutes or vice versa?
- senectus1 5y ago
  oh Australians really like rules. so when lockdowns come out we (especially in the west) just loved going into lockdown and dishing shit on those that flouted the rules. its a weird dichotomy that we're very easy going and freedom loving yet also love rules and enforcing them.
pjc50 5y ago
Australia took quarantine really seriously. The plus side: less than a thousand deaths, hospitality mostly open, very few short lockdowns. The downside is that the lockdowns that do happen are very heavy, and anyone breaching them is treated like a smoker in a fireworks factory.
- psychedelican 5y ago
  The deaths and despair from lockdowns far surpass those created from COVID alone. I bet missed cancer screenings alone have caused more than a thousand deaths in Australia.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    This is such an unfounded skynews hyperbolic sort of comment. In no way could you provide any sort of facts for this statement.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    You’re comparing mismatched quantities. You should be comparing how many would have died and how much despair would be caused in the absence of the lockdown. Consider this hypothetical: a pandemic solution which completely eliminates the disease while causing exactly 1 premature death. The death and despair from the solution far surpasses that of the disease itself, with infinity percent more death! This is clearly not a useful metric. In the case of COVID, everywhere had some kind of pandemic response, but the least effective so far is Peru with 5982.3 deaths per million population, vs Australia’s 36 per million. Multiply by population, and the difference between the Peruvian and Australian fatality rate indicates Australia saved 152 thousand people. That’s the number of Australian residents you need to suspect have fatally missed a cancer screening. Caveat: it ain’t over ‘till it’s over, and the Iron Pyrite medal for highest death toll can always change hands. Edit: decimal point off by one
bmsleight_ 5y ago
If I invited a contractor into my home and I knew there was say exposed live electricity wires. Even if the contractors was not damaged - I should be prosecuted. So he exposed someone to a risk that was avoidable. Any other Health and Safety risk, would have been prosecuted in the same way (in the UK not Australia). [CDM regulations]
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  Or he informed them ahead of time and they took the risk on their own.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
A country that has single-digit cases and is desperately trying to get it back to zero will necessarily and justifiedly have much stricter quarantine rules. Safety wise, this is comparable to randomly firing a bullet at an occupied building. Most likely the bullet will miss (the guy won't be infected/won't infect), but if you get really unlucky (someone gets infected and spreads it before that connection can be discovered), the results are disastrous (and deadly - COVID still has a 1% IFR as far as I know).
- breck 5y ago
  I think you’re off by orders of magnitudes. Maybe build a model first and get back to us?
- lostlogin 5y ago
  The case numbers were 99 yesterday, so yes, double digit, but it’s not good. Australia locked down, but from a New Zealand perspective their lockdowns have been rather less harsh than ours. Supermarkets and medical practices (for humans and animals) were all we had open. It has seemed that their way got the results while having more shops open, though they are in a tight spot right now.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  This story isn't enough to gauge safety. We don't know who wasn't vaccinated or when he informed visitors of his quarantine status.
- ipspam 5y ago
  The IFR, depending on whom you believe, was always in the 0.23-0.7% range. The CFR is a worthless junk statistic for estimating risk to the individual and is only of use for managing services. Whether it is lower now or not is more a philosophical question as empirical, the IFR has been demolished by vaccinating the elderly. This can be taken two ways.... Either that Covid was never a risk to most people to begin with and only appeared deadly because of those close to death, OR Vaccines have saved us. Either way, the CFR in Briton of the Delta Variant is 0.13%, for the unvaccinated that number is 0.08% A reasonable IFR rate would be close to half those rates (in my opinion, as that is unknowable) https://archive.is/Um0V9 https://archive.is/Um0V9
Derek_Mudaxe 5y ago
>I get that a former penal colony probably has inherited expansive judicial discretion This made me double take. The Thirteen colonies was used as a penal colony too, so maybe the USA has expansive judicial discretion too, or maybe it's not really relevant.
- jjk166 5y ago
  Well it does have both the highest incarceration rate and highest absolute number of people incarcerated in the world.
  - Derek_Mudaxe 5y ago
    Just carrying on the tradition then I suppose.
liminal 5y ago
You seem to think that not following a quarantine order isn't a big deal. Others think otherwise.
LatteLazy 5y ago
On the other hand Aus is basically covid free and has been for nearly a year. Meanwhile us Liberal brits let everyone flout the rules and we're headed into a third wave despite being over 60% vaccinated. Oh and we created at least 1 new variant. Oh and we've had a lot more disruption, lockdowns, curfews etc. Sometimes giving up some freedom now gets you a lot more freedom (and fewer dead people) in the very near future.
jhanschoo 5y ago
> He was sentenced to seven months in prison, but can walk free after serving just two months behind bars. I don't know if you read the part where it says that he actually needs to spend only 2 months behind bars, but if you didn't, does that change your opinion?

wrycoder 5y ago

In North Korea, they just shoot them.

amackera 5y ago
Buddy they do that in America too

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago

Australians, please, vote out your leadership. The Morrison administration is the worst thing to happen to Australia in years. Absolutely incompetence, misinformation, pandering to fossil fuel industry, environmental destruction and lies. Media Watch, the ABC news program captures some of the absolute stupidity occurring down under: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssBtV3J7BBLZAuY9U5UX92mt https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssBtV3J7BBLZ... This all could have been resolved by now if Australia had decent leadership. They were offered the solution, but were so pig headed they refused it. Now they are in an even worse situation. "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." Donald Horne, 1964

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Well, now he will get a government provided "quarantine".

AlexCoventry 5y ago

I'm looking forward to Australia relaxing entry requirements on vaccinated international travelers.

anotherevan 5y ago

This article[1] has a little more detail. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783343/WA-man-sentenced-SEVEN-MONTHS-jail-failing-comply-Covid-rules.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783343/WA-man-sent... Some things to note: * There were fifteen separate incidents of quarantine breach. He also, "regularly left his house for hours at a time" during that period. * The magistrate as much as said the harshness was in-part a warning to other would-be offenders (sending a "powerful message"). Yeah, we do take quarantine pretty seriously here. Having gone through the extended lockdowns in Victoria, while our geography was advantageous, it also required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation to get back to zero community transmission. It relied on following the advice of our health experts and scientists in the face of large economic and political pressures. In Melbourne now we are enjoying reasonably normal conditions compared to B.C. (Before COVID) times. So we have a pretty low tolerance for any "dick-head" that may put that at risk. That said, I'm surprised at jail time instead of a steep monetary fine. It is a shame we pretty much squandered our gains with a very poorly handled vaccination roll-out (but that's a discussion for another time).