People are fucking stupid and in large groups respond extremely poorly to fear driven hysteria. Their critical reasoning skills completely evaporate and a domino effect occurs, as more people buy into hyperbole and misinformation.
Here's what's happened.
- Coronavirus calls into concern manufacturing and export of goods, due to quarantine of workers from factors, and extreme restrictions on travel and shipping
- Australian government puts aggressive travel restrictions on certain regions, including China
- A Current Affair, as expected, run a fear-mongering shitpiece on the concern of certain goods being limited in Australia due to the aforementioned restrictions, citing toilet paper as one of them
- Collectives of Australians panic and buy into the bullshit wholesale, running to their nearest supermarkets and buying toilet paper in EXTREME bulk
- I'm talking literally 100+ rolls bulk, at least, as if the country as a whole will not have toilet paper for years
- Stores are cleared out by virtue of just this, further seeding the concept of limited immediate supplies, which has transformed from a ludicrous concept into an actual reality as stores are emptied
- Now everyone is buying bulk toilet paper, not just for themselves but family and friends too, because people who need toilet paper just generally literally cannot find any anywhere, and neither can the people they know
- This, again, feeds back into the problem of short supplies, as people who don't buy into the hysteria are still having trouble getting toilet paper, and thus naturally buy more than normal when they finally can
- Australians collectively end up purchasing two years worth of fucking toilet paper based on fear driven hysteria and hitpiece garbage from A Current Affair, almost everyone failing to recognise that a large volume of Australia's toilet paper is made in our own fucking country and thus not even impacted by shipping/travel bans, yet create a supply problem out of fear that should never have happened in the first place
All of this is a very, very good indicator that if, if there was some actual, nightmarish collapse of society or legitimately serious limitation on resources for whatever reason (war, for example), Australian society would just implode in on itself through idiocy and selfishness and fear.