Andrew Bolt: How Annaliese van Diemen’s tweet exposes COVID-19 extremism
A senior health official’s tweet abusing Captain James Cook helps to explain why Victoria has Australia’s toughest coronavirus laws — and why we’ll all pay as its Labor government destroys our economy and looks to China for rescue, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Annaliese van Diemen’s tweet exposes the coronavirus gang. What kind of extremists have turned Victoria almost into a police state?
Her tweet abusing Captain James Cook helps to explain why Victoria has Australia’s toughest coronavirus laws, and why we’ll all pay as its Labor government destroys its economy and looks to China for rescue.
Van Diemen is Victoria’s deputy chief health officer, helping to fight the coronavirus. Yet at 10.16am last Wednesday, she took time out to attack the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay.
She tweeted: “Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive.
“COVID-19 or Cook 1770?”
Most critics attacked just one half of Van Diemen’s astonishing analogy — the one showing that this graduate of James Cook University is amazingly ignorant of Cook himself.
Cook spent just one week at Botany Bay and killed nobody. Instead, he describes in his journal repeatedly trying to befriend Aborigines: “We left several articles such as Cloth, Looking glasses, Combs, Beeds (sic) Nails &c.”
This alone suggests Van Diemen may form her opinions by consulting not the facts but political fashions, as when she berates Australia as a “racist nation”.
But look at the other side of Van Diemen’s crazy analogy — that this virus is “decimating” our population.
Again, she is catastrophising. This virus has so far killed just 94 Australians, half aged 80 or older and many already sick. In comparison, 1255 Australians died of the flu in 2017.
This is where we should start feeling scared of the kind of people who’ve imposed Australia’s harshest coronavirus bans, stopping Victorians even from playing golf, visiting their children or going to school.
None of those bans are likely to make any real difference to the transmission of a virus that is very rarely spread outdoors, rarely infects children and has just 50 or so Victorians ill right now — all either safely in hospital or in quarantine.
But it turns out Van Diemen is far from alone in wildly exaggerating dangers we face.
Take her boss. Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has huge powers under Victoria’s state of emergency to impose coronavirus bans, yet still found time in March to publish a paper warning that global warming, too, was an “existential threat”.
He recommended tough “whole-of-government” crackdowns to save us from alleged disasters such as “flooding, coastal inundation, bushfire, extreme wind, soil movement and extreme heat”.
Hmm. Sutton, like Van Diemen, seems prone to catastrophising. Indeed, just two weeks ago he was still claiming his coronavirus bans had saved 36,000 lives, when the NSW government was modestly claiming to have saved just 700.
Sutton was clearly still relying on discredited modelling by the Peter Doherty Institute, which used dodgy Chinese data to warn the virus would kill between 50,000 and 150,000 Australians. That modelling so panicked the Victorian government that it spent $1.3 billion to create 4500 intensive care beds. Just seven beds are being used.
Victoria overreacted because Sutton and Van Diemen report to a Premier, Daniel Andrews, who shares not just their politics but their alarmism, and has a disturbing streak of authoritarianism.
Andrews, of Labor’s Socialist Left faction, already had Australia’s most absurdly tough global warming policies, and now has the most absurd coronavirus laws as well.
He even defended his golf ban as a matter of life or death: “I don’t need to play golf, and me playing golf is not worth someone’s life.”
What a mad rationalisation. Golf with social distancing would kill nobody. Nor do we “need” to do anything that makes life worth living, including visiting family and friends, or just sitting at the beach to watch the sun go down.
Andrews’ response shows little respect for freedom. Nor does his solution to the economic devastation he is causing.
Alone among Australia’s leaders, he signed on to the “belt and road initiative” of China’s dictatorship, which aims to increase China’s reach and power through trade, investments and access to ports.
Through a spokesman, Andrews last week said we now needed this deal with the dictatorship even more: “(These) opportunities will be more important than ever as we rebuild from this crisis.”
So what Andrews destroyed with his bans, China will be invited to help rebuild.
Does this not worry you, too?
COOKING THE BOOKS
TO mark James Cook landing at Botany Bay 250 years ago, the ABC somehow found activist Teresa Ardler.
Ardler said stories that Cook fired into the air to stop Aborigines throwing spears were “not the true history, because my grandfather was shot.”
Wow. Her grandfather must have lived to 200.
Amazingly, SBS, also taxpayer-funded, interviewed Rodney Kelly, also claiming descent from the man Cook stung with small shot.
Kelly claimed his ancestors said “Cook left casks of dynamite on the shore, rigged to blow up”. But dynamite wasn’t invented until 1867.
Why did the ABC and SBS retail such nonsense?
Andrew Bolt is a Herald Sun columnist