Except for the monarchy bit, it sounds alot like America right now.
There you go.
I still think Australia and NZ have benefited from being in the pacific region, however, with good neighbors.
As Ana and others have noted, we benefit from being not-transport-hub islands. However, what we really benefited from is a concordance of federal governments, state governments, strong scientific driven leadership and a populace who all agreed a shut down and suppression made good sense.
For instance, we not only shut down international flights, but also domestic flights, and for the first time in the country's history shut the state borders.
In Dec 2019, our prime minister's approval rating was 45%. This month it is 66%
The approval rating of our State premiers this month are:
Gladys Berejiklian, NSW 75%
Daniel Andrews VIC 65%
Annastacia Palaszczuk, QLD, 65%
Steven Marshall, SA, 65%
Mark McGowan, WA
87%
WA has had a hard border shutdown from the rest of the country for the last 9 months. I am from Perth, haven't seen my family in all that time, and he's at 87%. I mean seriously, 87%!
Daniel Andrews put us through a 112 day extreme lock down for the only second wave in Australia which was entirely caused by his office mismanaging quarantine hotels in the first place and he's at
65%
We accepted the consensus agreement of all our leaders (including those not in power) that this was the right approach, we felt reassured that no-one in any part of the government objected to the massive spend on job keeper and job seeker boosts that basically had the Australian government paying people's wages, which passed through the legislature in rapid time with bipartisan support.
Questions like this interest me because I believe this could be a global civilizational shift away from western hegemony. If anything, Confucian values seem to be the real winner in the pandemic, something that hasn't been lost on Confucian scholars such as Daniel Bell.
Australia and New Zealand show you don't need that Asian authoritarian approach to succeed, and I see precious little evidence of any Europeans or Americans extolling the virtues of that concept.
