Malcolm Dreaneen
DTNZ editor
A huge thank you to Matt Shelton, Lynda Wharton, Alison Goodwin, Claire Deeks, Alia Bland and Katie Ashby-Koppens for their excellent testimony at Thursday’s Covid inquiry hearing.
It was heartening to see the concerns of many Kiwis presented in an articulate and highly professional way, and I know many are very grateful to them for their dedication and efforts and for giving those who were silenced and ostracised a voice.
Watching day four of this phase of the inquiry, my attention was caught by a particular line of questioning that was put to most of those I mentioned above. The questions had to do with the Bill of Rights, and were along the lines of ‘you would agree that the rights in the Bill of Rights Act are subject to reasonable limits?’.
We should all see where this is going.
Once again, the protection of individual human rights will be sacrificed for the notion of the “greater good” – the re-appearance of the old ‘saving granny’ trick.
The fact that the right to refuse medical treatment was considered by some during the Covid pandemic to be subordinate to the ‘greater good’ was a disgrace. The Covid pandemic was the precise moment in history when that right should have been respected – a time in which the full power of the state, its coercive tactics, its monopoly on violence and power of detention, its unlimited finances and mass propaganda machine were all being brought to bear simultaneously on citizens in order to make them take a novel medical treatment.
The standard response of judicial bodies to an inconvenient Bill of Rights breach claim is that such breach was a “reasonable limitation” on that right. The relevant section is section 5 of the NZ Bill or Rights Act (BORA), which states:
Subject to section 4, the rights and freedoms contained in this Bill of Rights may be subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Section 5 is an out-clause. It gives judges and decision-makers space within which they can engage in jurisprudential gymnastics in order to give the decision they or their political masters want, rather than the decision that ought to be given. The trump card of Section 5 is readily available in the judge’s back pocket for these purposes.
Pre-Covid pandemic, most New Zealanders would have thought they really had the right to refuse medical treatment. But we discovered the hard way that in fact we don’t – Section 5, coupled with the legal doctrine of Judicial Notice blew that rosy misconception out of the water.
In particular, pre-Covid, it was a given that any person had the right not to take a vaccine. This had never, ever, been an issue. As Kiwis, for generations, we had played rugby and netball together, ate and drank with one another, kissed and hugged, attended the cinema and concerts, caught planes and trains in Wellington, Bangkok and Timbuktu without any concern whatsoever whether the person next to us was jabbed for smallpox or HPV, or any other ‘virus’.
I would argue that the right to refuse medical treatment should be inalienable and without limit, and subject only to two narrow exceptions:
- life-threatening emergency situations; or
- where by reason of mental incapacity or young age, someone is not capable of giving informed consent.
Apart from these two exceptions, the right to refuse medical treatment should be without any limits.
The BORA reaffirms the existence of 20 basic human rights. They are all important, but some are more important than others.
The right not to be deprived of life (section 8), and the right to refuse medical treatment (section 11) are, in my opinion, the most important and fundamental human rights any person can have.
Without these rights you cannot be considered a human with free will, and, in the case of section 11, its limitation opens up a way by which the brute force of the state can be brought to bear onto the very fibre of one’s being.
If the state can dictate to me what I must ingest or inject into my body, or use coercive tactics by mandating such substances, then that is the end of the Rule of Law, for there is nothing else more that I have which the state cannot intrude upon.
At the beginning of this century an Englishman’s home was his castle and the state could not enter into it without a warrant. Since then the ramparts of this castle have been breached at multiple points. Our rights to privacy and protection from state intrusion are in full retreat. Our phones, internet usage, and whereabouts are tracked 24/7; our private conversations in the home are recorded. Thanks to the Five Eyes Alliance, all this private information can be handed over to the state on a whim without any oversight, to the point where now, in 2025, our bodies really are the last bastions where the final stand against this invasion of our individual sovereignty must take place.
One of the hallmarks of the British legal system is the primacy it has placed on individual human rights (see, e.g., the seminal Entick v Carrington case of 1765) – the doctrine or belief that the state is, and should be, subject to the same laws and limitations that private citizens are. The enforcement of and adherence to this ideal of equality of standing before the law has been one of the most important achievements in Western civilisation. It acts as a deterrent on state overreach and has helped to guide the development of Western society away from barbarism and tyranny and onto the path of enlightenment.
Watering down the right to refuse medical treatment based on the notion of the ‘greater good’ is a step away from enlightenment and progress and a leap backwards towards the Dark Ages. The ‘greater good’ is in fact promoted by an insistence on an individual’s right to be in full control of their body and what goes into it, without pressure, coercion, or consequences. Without this red line there is no free will and individuality. The Body Politic becomes a mass of Bodies for the Politic where even the integrity of our cells and DNA are at the mercy of an unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat in Wellington.
The real test of the right will come when there is a highly contagious and deadly pathogen. But this was not the case with Covid. Matt Shelton and Alison Goodwin quite rightly pointed out that the government’s initial response of shutting the borders and early lockdowns were reasonable precautionary measures to allow the country to wait and see how things developed, especially in light of the alleged surge of deaths in global hotspots. But when it became clear, relatively quickly thereafter, that there was little to no risk of serious disease or death for the vast majority of the population, then the measures taken, including the subsequent mandating of a novel mRNA injection, became unwarranted and unreasonable. Some would even say the continued pushing of the measures was evil – for example, the refusal by the Director-General of Health to grant exemptions to the vaccine-injured or those medically vulnerable to the ‘vaccines’, as described by Lynda Wharton at the inquiry, will surely go down in history as one of the most evil, sickest, practices to have ever taken place in New Zealand.
And what of the ‘Doomsday’ scenario I have mentioned, of a highly deadly and contagious disease? Should an unlimited right to refuse a medical treatment be afforded in those circumstances?
If I refuse to take a medical treatment and die, then that is my fault. If I refuse to take a demonstrably safe and effective existing medical treatment, and my refusal puts others at risk, then lock me down, but with a guarantee of income (repayable later) and a right to pursue the state for full compensation. This way the fundamental right to keep the state out of my body is protected, along with granny. It places consequences on me, and more importantly, on the state, for our respective actions and decisions.
This article was originally published by the Daily Telegraph New Zealand.
