OPINION
Ramesh Thakur
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
Dominic Perrottet was the premier (head of state government) of New South Wales from 5 October 2021 to 28 March 2023. Having lost the election last year, he has now resigned from parliament to take up a position with the Australian mining company BHP as the head of its corporate and external affairs in Washington, DC. In his valedictory speech in the NSW parliament on 6 August, he criticised the vaccine mandates. Alexandra Marshall, editor of the online Flat White component of Spectator Australia, wrote this excoriating piece on 7 August about his cowardice as premier.
– Ramesh Thakur
Former New South Wales Premier, Dominic Perrottet, came out yesterday and declared that Covid vaccine mandates enforced by his government were ‘wrong.’
It’s all well and good for Mr Perrottet to come clean now, during a valedictory speech, as he retires from politics.
There are no consequences for his admission, no risk to his political future, and therefore no bravery or credit which I am prepared to offer him.
At the time the mandates were discussed, Mr Perrottet was the one man in NSW with the power to protect people from dangerous, insufficiently tested, and unsatisfactorily trialled vaccines. He, alone, was the person with the elected power to protect the rights of every New South Welshman and allow them to choose what to put into their body and what sort of health risk they were prepared to take. He could have kept people employed and put an end to idiotic and patently false health messaging. As premier, that was his job.
I have always said that the government should not be allowed to mandate a citizen drink a glass of water, let alone inject a product from pharmaceutical companies that are protected – by law – from damages. We are people, not common lab rats.
As far as I am concerned, it is not good enough for Mr Perrottet to insist the government was acting with ‘the right intentions,’ especially when the government was told – in the pages of this magazine – that what they were doing was wrong.
The vaccine handbook, which has been with us for a long time, made it clear that Mr Perrottet’s decision, and that of Gladys Berejiklian before him, was wrong and that the advice from the health minister was in violation of the basic liberties we expect to enjoy as a civilised people. A health minister, I might add, who ignored mountains of evidence that contradicted their assertions.
None of this is news to Mr Perrottet, who seemed as uncomfortable with what he was saying at the time.
What he lacked was not a conscience, but a spine – a spine tough enough to stand up to the peer pressure of power-hungry Labor premiers and the Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who looked down the barrel of the camera and declared that there was no such thing as a vaccine mandate while tens of thousands were marched out of their jobs. Most of them never got their jobs back. Many of them sit idle today, broken by what they have lost.
Mr Perrottet’s valedictory speech is weaker than the headline trending on social media.
‘If the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as is now mostly accepted, the law should have left more room for respect of freedom. Vaccines saved lives, but ultimately, mandates were wrong. People’s personal choices shouldn’t have cost them their jobs.’
Mr Perrottet, these Covid vaccines killed people and left many more seriously injured.
A state mandate – a mandate put out by the Liberal government – not only robbed people of their liberty, but of their lives. This is inexcusable.
‘When I became premier, we removed [vaccine mandates] or the ones we actually could, but this should have happened faster. If a pandemic comes again, we need to get a better balance encouraging people to take action whilst at the same time protecting people’s fundamental liberty.’
No, Mr Perrottet.
We need to urgently reverse the expanded emergency powers that premiers – in particular Victoria’s Daniel Andrews – gifted themselves. We need legislation to prohibit politicians from taking advantage of a public health situation and ensure that every single emergency decision has a non-negotiable sunset clause coupled with an extremely high bar of physical data before they can be implemented. None of this, ‘Oh well, if the premier thinks there’s a risk of a pandemic, we can do…’
Pharmaceutical companies need to have their immunity stripped and ensure that the public and the state (on behalf of the public) remain free to seek damages for faulty, dangerous, or non-functioning drugs. We never want to see another situation where hundreds of billions of public money is spent on foreign drug companies for a mandated vaccine only for large quantities of it to be thrown in landfill. Who is responsible for this hideous waste of money? Mr Morrison? He’s toddled off. Mr Albanese? He’s washed his hands of Covid.
Most importantly, we need to have some kind of severe punishment for the behaviour of our premiers, prime ministers, health ministers, and media class (who took marketing money from vaccine companies) for the deliberate crucible of wall-to-wall fear propaganda that was created to manipulate the public perception of Covid and encourage them to take risks with their health they never would have done in a sane environment.
There remains no excuse for daily press conferences with death tolls posted in the corner without context, the constant creation of petty and unscientific health orders, the deployment of police and army personnel onto the street, the invention of digital stalking apps, the assignment of ‘ticks’ and ‘crosses’ to gatekeep the economy based on vaccine status, the setting up of ‘dobbing’ websites to encourage neighbours to spy on each other – I could go on…Those who partook in and set up the framework for this abusive behaviour must face personal punishment or they will do it again.
Australians cannot like a post on Facebook without police knocking on the door, and yet every level of our government engaged in crimes against our humanity – what is their punishment? Cushy jobs and juicy retirement packages.
‘If we established Australia today, no one in their right mind would set up the federation the way it is. We currently have federal and state health systems that don’t even work alongside each other. Rather, they actively work against each other.
‘If we can’t reform the federal health system after a one in 100-year pandemic, we never will.’
These are nonsense excuses, none of which absolve Mr Perrottet of his part in this sorry story. As premier, he was elected to protect us – and he didn’t. He threw us to the wolves and bent over at the first strike.
Are you too frightened to go outside? Are you ‘up to date’ with Covid boosters? Why not? There is a 33 per cent increase in Covid and serious flu infections. People are filling hospitals and plenty are dying.
Australia is not gripped by fear because the political swamp and the media class aren’t up there on the screen telling everyone to be afraid. There’s no political traction in peddling fear – so they’re not doing it. They’ve moved on to the trillions of dollars waiting to be distributed on their new favourite headline – Climate Change.
I will never stop being angry about what happened to us during the Covid years but the least those in power could do is punish those who abused their position or – through inaction and cowardice – failed to act.
Hell, I’d settle for all of them having their pensions stripped. What do you think?
This article was republished by the Brownstone Institute from the Spectator.
