Why does the Australian freedom movement always take such unprincipled approaches, at the wrong places and times?

Freedom is not about the ability to hurt or infect others - freedom is about the ability to have nothing to do with them, good or bad.

Democracy is an internal mechanism of settling disputes within a group of people who agreed to be together, presumably because they had some common goals and decided to try and achieve them together.

Forcing majority rule over an arbitrary cohort (such as all the humans who happen to live in a given continent) which never in the first place willingly agreed to have anything to do with each other, is not a democracy but a tyrannical farce.

Forming political parties is playing the game of democracy of others you never wanted to play with.

The so-called "freedom movement" failed and will continue to fail because they still want to be "Australians", they still want to benefit from what the Australian society and their state has to offer, they are unwilling to sacrifice its comforts but want to be exempt from its restrictions when they do not suit them.

For as long as I can remember both left-wing and right-wing protest march organisers have tried to claim that their protests attracted more than the police or media estimates. It is hard to estimate crowd sizes precisely, but it is usually organisers that are wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-26/coronacheck-melbourne-covid-protest-crowd-size/100650146

It doesn't matter how many people attend protests, demonstrations, riots, they are all totally useless - a waste of time, and an bloody nuisance to people trying to go about their business.

What Yuyutsu says.
Alan B.

The 'freedom movement' was a confection of Koch Network think tanks, via a website in Germany promoted by the same Network e.g. locally Jo Nova et al., why?

Disrupting centrist governments and liberal democracy for media content or agitprop, but more important is the demonisation of science and dismissive attitudes to sensible regulation; Covid science denial was the same modus operandi as climate science denial.

According to DeSmog UK (10 Aug '20):

'How the UK's Climate Science Deniers Turned Their Attention to COVID-19. The coronavirus crisis quickly divided the population between those putting their trust in public health experts and others quick to question the science.'

From the same source, according to Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science University of Bristol, in the UK all the usual suspects and grifters of the architecture of influence of the right promoting Covid science denial or scepticism:

'...you have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

Dear Andras Smith,

Indeed, what a waste: rather than aiming at the monster's head and repudiating the very [unscientific] notion that it is OK for some people to order others around under threat of violence, this movement used all their energy to pick a petty fight against virus-response - wrong time, wrong place!

The problem with public health is not the science, but rather how "public" is defined - what is it which allows a certain group of people to represent themselves as "the public". Should the "freedom movement" been able to choose their own society of like-minded people so that they were "the public" rather than the current regime, I am pretty convinced that their practical response to the virus would have then been at least as scientific.