A thick, glossy brochure dropped in my mailbox the other day: it turned out to be Pauline Hanson’s One Nation election manifesto. Clearly, the minor party think this election is their big chance. Certainly, no other party’s election mailouts have explained so many policies in such detail (when it comes to Labor, they’re doing their best not to detail any at all).
But it was the final page that really caught my eye: here, One Nation reiterate their demand for a Royal Commission into Australia’s Covid policy response. It’s the inquiry we need, but almost certainly won’t get — especially not if the state premiers have anything to say about it. Because a great many people in high places have an awful lot of explaining to do.
On any fair assessment, the Australian response to the Wuhan virus has been secretive and arbitrary. In terms of costs and deaths, it has been a disaster.
Apart from closer control of the international borders, at times inadequate – as we saw with the Ruby Princess – almost every decision taken by the ruling politicians was wrong.
They set aside what was surely their overriding duty, to protect the easily identifiable vulnerable.
Apart from advice on hygiene and distancing and ensuring early treatment was available, their role should have been to allow the rest of the nation to get on with their lives in a free society.
That was, however, the last thing the politicians would tolerate.
China likes to boast about its “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, meaning a totalitarian communist state which tolerates, not free enterprise, but crony oligarchy. The West, on the other hand, has been stealthily transformed into what American academic Michael Rectenwald calls “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” — which is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
The most indisputably Chinese characteristic inflicted on the West has been the signature policy of our governments’ Covid response: lockdowns.
Lockdowns were explicitly rejected in the pandemic response plans painstakingly drawn up by health agencies over decades, and last updated on the eve of the Covid pandemic. Lockdowns, on the other hand, were pioneered by the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan — and Western governments fell over themselves to play copy-cat.
The sheer inutility of this is demonstrated by the fact that the State with the longest lockdowns, Victoria, was the very one with the largest number of deaths, to date 2,675 […]
The draconian Beijing-style policies adopted by governments have had devastating impacts on Australians, in relation to their finances, their work, their businesses, their education and their mental health.
The delays in elective surgery and in testing for all sorts of diseases, including cancer, will no doubt have a deleterious effect.
Although it is difficult to say with surety, given the shambolic way data has been collected and the clear propensity to exaggerate both “cases” and deaths, it is fairly certain that the global hysteria over Covid has been out of all proportion to its actual threat. The Hong Kong flu of the late 60s was almost certainly on a par with Covid — yet, not a single city was locked down in ’68 and ’69, nor was anyone forcibly masked. In fact, most people who lived through can’t even seem to recall that it happened at all.
The nation and especially future generations have been left a massive debt.
None of this was necessary; all of this must be avoided in planning how best to respond to the next virus.
What we saw during the crisis was the culmination of the gradual whittling away under the rigorous two-Party system of the protections against the phenomenon about which Acton famously warned, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely […]
What we saw everywhere was government at the whim of one or two ruling politicians.
Politicom
Or worse, unelected, and hitherto almost completely unknown to the public, bureaucrats.
Never have we seen so starkly demonstrated the truth of the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The question is: are we going to let them get away with it?
