By JOHN FUND
The dictatorial COVID protocols Down Under are providing
an object lesson in how not to respond to the pandemic — or any crisis.
Last month, Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime
minister, told the United Nations that his nation believes in “freedom,”
“respecting the rights and freedoms of the individual,” and “the inherent
dignity of all people, . . . no matter the circumstances.”
His critics were stunned at the contrast between his
lofty words and life today in much of Australia, which Tony Abbott, a former
prime minister from Morrison’s own party, has called a “health
dictatorship.”
“The prime minister must live in a parallel universe,”
former Australian senator David Leyonhjelm tweeted, while another commenter
joked that Morrison should have called on the U.N. to “restore human rights in
Australia.”
Video bloggers quickly put together clips juxtaposing
Morrison’s speech with scenes of police firing rubber bullets at protesters,
pepper-spraying an elderly lady, arresting people for eating a snack in a park
without a mask, and tackling and choking various other people deemed to be in
violation of COVID rules.
Soldiers and police helicopters patrol Sydney’s streets
and skies to enforce that city’s lockdown. There are prohibitions on people
traveling to neighboring states even if it is to visit sick loved ones.
Thousands of overseas Australians are unable to come home because of government
limits on daily arrivals.
Enforcement of regulations has been highly arbitrary. In
Queensland, outdoor-mask mandates were imposed because of just two new COVID
cases. In Victoria, Premier Dan Andrews has promised to “lock out” the
unvaccinated from the economy, while New South Wales has made the shot
mandatory for public-sector workers. But politicians are exempted, and bans
on Australians traveling in or out of their country are routinely waived for
athletes, billionaires, and celebrities.
Americans love Australians, and they see echoes of their
own free and rugged history in Australia’s own frontier founding. They take
note of swashbuckling Australian nonconformists from Crocodile Dundee to Steve
Irwin to Rupert Murdoch.
But those images conflict with the jarring reality that
part of Australian culture allows closet authoritarians to flourish. The late
Clive James, who was one of Australia’s best-known public intellectuals, said,
“The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from
convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”
Rather than learn to live with the virus as an endemic
disease that will keep circulating and mutating over time, Australians are
being put through an endless cycle of lockdowns, in a fruitless government
attempt to eradicate COVID entirely.
Sadly, Australian courts have not proven themselves up to
the job of protecting individual rights.
Ramesh Thakur, an emeritus professor at the Australian
National University, notes that
courts have refused to provide redress no matter how
arbitrary, draconian, unscientific, and ineffective the regulations. According
to one analysis in the Sydney Morning Herald, public-health
measures issued under the enabling emergency powers can only be assessed as a
package of measures, not individually, and they could go on indefinitely if the
health authorities just declare the emergency still exists.
Thakur points out that every day about 460
people die of all causes in Australia. As of October 1, the
total number of COVID-19-related deaths since the pandemic began is 1,334.
That is meant to justify all of the draconian limits on personal freedom,
including the right to earn a living.
The news media — especially the state-owned Australian
Broadcasting Corporation — have generally failed to hold the government to
account for all this. Gideon Rozner, the director of policy at the Institute of
Public Affairs in Melbourne, told Fox News that recent protests have barely been reported:
We’ve seen during Melbourne protests that the police in
my home state of Victoria asked the Civil Aviation Authorities to declare a
no-fly zone over Melbourne so that commercial media outlets couldn’t film
the protesters in case people saw how big they were and went down and joined in
the protests and started marching as well.
That is an extraordinary step for any government to take.
The police censoring the broadcast media and it has been in the main accepted.
A rare voice against Australia’s lockdown mentality
is Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister who is
now working as an official envoy strengthening trade ties between Britain and
Australia. He said the lockdowns have left Australia with a stop-start economy,
as well as a stop-start life in which young people were losing a sense of
personal responsibility.
People once sturdily self-reliant looking to the
government more than ever for support and sustenance, a something-for-nothing
mindset, reinforced amongst young people spared the need of searching for jobs.
Every day it goes on, it risks establishing a new normal.
Fear of falling sick is stopping us from feeling fully alive.
The lessons for the United States are clear. There
will be a future pandemic of some kind or at a minimum more COVID variants. We
will be told by the “experts” that we will have to live with lockdowns that
were once touted as temporary measures meant to avoid hospital overcrowding,
but the lockdowns will now be defended as part of a permanent public-health
emergency. Winston Churchill once said it was important “to keep experts on
tap but not on top,” and he warned that allowing them to become the
equivalent of a high-priest caste giving us the answers, with sheeplike
government officials following their dictates, was the complete absence of
leadership.
It’s vital that America develop more leaders who will
step forward to safeguard the public’s health and freedoms at the same time. We’ve
seen what the absence of that leadership has led to in Australia, once viewed
as one of the world’s freest countries.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/when-will-someone-hold-human-rights-hearings-on-australia/
