Victorian Chief Health Officer Dr Brett Sutton has singled out the residents of Montmorency for exhibiting “elite social distancing” behaviour, as Melbourne’s suburbs continue to grapple with restricting the spread of COVID-19. While officials don’t often talk about individual suburbs, residents of Northcote were recently championed for their ability to keep their distance from strangers, in stark contrast to the behaviour of a bunch of hooligans at St Kilda Beach last Friday night.

And the parallels between Northcote and Montmorency are clear to see, with a shared interest in environmentalism, good coffee, and name dropping their home suburb in general conversation. Highlighting good behaviour in contrast to bad behaviour is believed to be a new tactic by the Victorian Government, adopting the age-old parable of using the carrot rather than the stick to motivate a donkey.

An inside source within Sutton’s team said Monty got a mention during yesterday’s team briefing. The anonymous insider said, “Yeah, the Minister was very impressed by reports from Montmorency. Which makes sense, I mean, they were made for social distancing. They don’t even need the 5km radius, because most of them say that Monty has everything they need. In the research we’ve conducted, many Montmorency residents deem a trip to Briar Hill as ‘going off premises’ so, in many ways, they were made for this kind of scenario. Sutto just kept calling them ‘elite’. He was like, ‘Those people in Monty get it, they practice ‘elite social distancing’. If more people in Melbourne were like them, we wouldn’t be having these problems right now.”

Hopefully nobody told him about the rumours from two years ago when a group of Montmorency residents were allegedly pushing to become an independent state…

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