Piers Akerman: Australia needs to get back to the non-COVID normal
Under the so-called COVID-Normal, we have seen Victorian police, dressed in similar garb to the helmeted stormtroopers, smashing bathers-wearing beach goers in Melbourne. The sooner the nation calls out these destructive forces and non-COVID normality returns, the better, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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Don’t be lulled into accepting so-called COVID-Normal as anything like normal. The extreme and onerous prohibitions under which we are being forced to live by our elected leaders on the advice of their so-called experts — all unelected — are brutal, amoral, and probably illegal if not almost certainly in breach of the Constitution.
Based on computer-generated modelling, which has been shown to be indisputably flawed, a regime never before experienced has been rolled out across the nation.
The two-bit authoritarians have effectively crushed the economy.
Politicians at every level from those on local councils, to the state parliaments and the federal sphere, have in the main shown they are not up to dealing with national crises.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s national cabinet has been undermined by state premiers acting in the most parochial manner as they play up imaginary differences between Australians separated by lines drawn on paper maps over a century ago.
It bears repeating that Labor Premiers Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Mark McGowan have been the most egregious in denying the vision which saw the founding of the modern nation in 1901.
If Andrews had his way, the standard gauge railway which finally linked the states in 1995 would be torn up and we’d still be changing trains at the borders — if they were open.
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Under COVID-Normal, we have seen Victorian police, dressed in similar garb to the helmeted stormtroopers crushing demonstrations against Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, smashing bathers-wearing beach goers in Melbourne.
Lukashenko swiftly closed his repressed state’s borders with Poland and Lithuania, Andrews has gone further and locked the residents of his state capital in their homes — except for two hour outings — and imposed a never-before used curfew.
Even the High Court has shown that it, too, is reluctant to hear challenges to the (I’m hesitant to use the word) unprecedented abusive restrictions being imposed upon the people.
The Court will not hear a challenge to Western Australia’s “all-or-nothing” approach to its border reopening until November.
Billionaire Clive Palmer, not a person whom I would naturally support, has both the will and the money to challenge WA Premier McGowan’s closed borders as they prevent citizens from other COVID-free jurisdictions, such as the Northern Territory, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia, from travelling freely.
Unwisely, the federal government has withdrawn support for his challenge, throwing out Morrison’s “we’re all in this together” mantra.
The Andrews’ government has gone even further than other Labor states in ensuring that it controls its people.
Nor satisfied with a 22-hour lockdown, it has introduced a bill that would allow people to be detained indefinitely by untrained people co-opted to become “authorised officers” and provided with extraordinary powers to arrest and detain their neighbours. The COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Amendment Bill would override all other laws and legislation with the exception of the Charter of Human Rights (which Labor installed but conveniently ignores as it is not binding), the State Constitution Act 1975 and the laws created by the Bill itself.
And as if the Victorian Health Department had already proved itself incapable of administering anything with its paper files and failed quarantine protection, the Bill would give the secretary of this incompetent bureaucracy the power to appoint public servants as “authorised officers” with the same powers as police.
Even Labor’s media outlet, the ABC has finally recognised Andrews’ disastrous hotel quarantining operation as a fiasco despite the howls of rusted-on Labor supporters who challenged the description.
As usual, the ABC sat in judgment on itself but its in-house editorial complaints unit last week rejected a complaint that political correspondent Jane Norman breached impartiality standards when she referred to the Victorian government’s handling of hotel quarantine as a “fiasco”.
The ABC found “the conclusion that hotel quarantine in Victoria was a failure is demonstrably true. Whether it is described as a ‘failure’ or a ‘fiasco’ is a matter of style, not substance”.
The sooner the nation calls out these destructive forces and non-COVID normality returns, the better.