Coronavirus tracking app is a reason for concern

Well, I was grounded. As I pointed out in a previous column, my job as a priest was one of the first declared "non-essential" during this coronavirus lockdown that's not a lockdown. So, I have been obediently staying home and putting my feet up, watching movies, waiting for the apocalypse to be over.

Then, the NSW government changed the rules on me mid-movie, declaring 16 reasons you can leave your home. Reason 14 is "you're a priest, a minister of religion or a member of a religious order and you're going to a place of worship or you're providing pastoral care to another person." That pretty much sums up my whole job. This is blatant government discrimination against lazy priests!

To drown my sorrows, I went down to the local liquor shop. I know that to avoid civil war, liquor stores are classified "essential services". But lately, I get nervous just seeing a police car. So, as the grog shop is less than a kilometre from my church, I decided to ride my bicycle and make my alcohol haul look like I was exercising.

I get down to the liquor store to discover these scammers are flogging off bottles of whisky as "Easter whisky". What, pray tell, makes a bottle of whisky "Easter" whisky? I had a good mind to complain to management, but at 15 per cent off, I begrudgingly bought a bottle.

Before I rode home I began to muse within myself: if I fall off my bike on the way home, this bottle of "Easter" whisky is going to get smashed!

So, I drank the bottle of Easter whisky before I rode home. This turned out to be a very wise decision as I ended up falling off my bike 17 times on the trip home.

Of all the disagreements I've been reading of in the media lately, an interesting one is between those who think the lockdowns are essential and those who think this is government interference. It's like listening to two mates arguing at the pub who have both had too much to drink and are arguing two completely different subjects.

Of course, the danger here is always that you - as the hopeful adjudicator - come in to settle the dispute and you've had too much to drink yourself.

Maybe both sides of the debate are correct. Those saying the virus is a threat to our lives and social distancing is necessary I believe have already been proven correct. Those saying the government has become a bit of a dictatorship and taken too much control of our lives may also be correct, but we will only know this in time.

Charles Dickens' historical fiction A Tale of Two Cities - regularly cited as the best-selling novel of all time - was inspired by the writings of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle believed that the history of humanity comes down to the leadership of only a few.

A significant portion of history's leaders were dictators who were given extraordinary powers to fight an enemy, but then, would not give up their power once that enemy was defeated.

The federal government's new mobile phone app to help track and trace coronavirus will track your contact with other people and automatically collect the phone number, name, age and postcode of a person you are physically near for more than 15 minutes. Is this wrong? For now, maybe not. But what about later? Surely the government will give us back our freedom and privacy once this is all over ... won't it?

How desperate are some people to not give up the power they already have? As reported in The Age in March of last year, Victoria's Andrews government spent $357.6 million on advertising in its first term. The taxpayer-funded self-praising increased to more than $105 million in the financial year before the state election from the $82.4 million spent the previous financial year of 2016-17. I'm not sure I want to drink to that.

Twitter: @frbrendanelee