Rita Panahi: ‘Heroes’ of the left waking up to Covid madness

Waleed Aly has emerged from his leftist fog to see the nonsense in politicians relinquishing their power to health bureaucrats.

Here is a sentence I never thought I’d write; Waleed Aly and Tim Soutphommasane are right.

No, I haven’t woken up in a parallel universe though it can feel that way when so many of your fellow countrymen who claim to care about liberty, human rights and evidence-based strategies champion totalitarian, unscientific policies and defend inhumane bastardry in the name of “public health’’.

On Sunday, Aly who co-hosts the unwatchable Leftist dross, The Project, sent much of his fan base into fits of unbridled rage by questioning the wisdom of politicians relinquishing their power to unelected, unaccountable public health bureaucrats.

“I think one of the more maddening aspects of our pandemic politics is that we’ve watched leader after leader get up and say, ‘We’re just following the health advice,’ we as a country have said, ‘That’s great, that’s exactly what you should do,’ but actually that’s not the job of a politician,” he said on the ABC’s Insiders program.

“A politician’s job is not to follow health advice. Their job is to take health advice, consider it, place it in its proper context with a whole suite of other imperatives that are non-health imperatives as well as health imperatives, and then come to a decision.”

How refreshing, and admittedly strange, to have a hero of the Left finally put forward the arguments advanced by conservative commentators throughout this pandemic. Unity at last, though Aly’s comments were met with hate and hysteria from Dan’s social media mob.

Waleed Aly has finally put forward the arguments advanced by conservative commentators throughout this pandemic.

In the case of Soutphommasane, the former race discrimination commissioner, has for months called out harmful policies that are corrosive to democratic rights but all too readily accepted in Australia.

Soutphommasane has cautioned against allowing “fear to get in the way of facts” and together with academic Professor Marc Stears has written about progressives (that’s what Leftists prefer to call themselves) being silent about the erosion of rights and liberties.

“The response from Australian public intellectuals and those who identify with the left has been astonishingly muted,” they wrote.

“Left-leaning voices have been loudly sceptical of the national plan to begin easing restrictions once 70 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated. Any ambition to reopen Australian society is regularly shouted down on social media. Left-leaning commentators increasingly insist that the absence of a vaccine for young children makes reopening impossible, despite the explicit reassurances of the country’s leading paediatricians. Talk about ‘freedom’ is routinely derided as libertarian excess, as though rights and liberties were yearned after only by the wealthy and by right-wing culture warriors, and not by the population at large.”

Halle-bloody-lujah. The fact that this deep into the pandemic we still have Australians prevented from coming home, while the rest of us are prevented from leaving, and thousands are left stranded by state border closures is a sign that both the federal and state governments have got it hopelessly wrong.

Worse is the cruelty we routinely inflict in the name of Covid safety including preventing families from seeing dying loved ones or attending a funeral or just crossing the border for medical care.

Dr Tim Soutphommasane has for months been calling out harmful policies that were corrosive to democratic rights.

Thankfully, the zero-Covid catastrophists who think that coronavirus can be eliminated if we just inflict enough suffering are losing influence.

Even Andrews and his chief health officer, Brett Sutton, have finally walked away from the elimination strategy and acknowledged that we must learn to live with a virus that scientists have told us for over a year will be endemic.

But many remain petrified and ill-informed about the virus and for that we can blame politicians, the alarmist “experts” and the clickbait media.

Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand, have become the subject of international mockery for the excesses of our Covid response.

In recent weeks there have been pieces in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Times, to name just a few, on Australia’s disproportionate Covid response.

Australians are finally waking up to the overreach but many have been beaten down so comprehensively that they’re grateful for the smallest of mercies like being allowed to break house arrest for four hours a day or the great privilege of travelling up to 10km from your home. Call it Melbourne Syndrome.

ALMOST from the very start of this crisis we’ve known that Covid-19 is a virus that disproportionately impacts the very old, the very ill and the morbidly obese. Every month this pandemic has progressed we’ve had more data reaffirming those undeniable facts.

You only need to look at the median age of death in Australia, which at 86 is higher than the average life expectancy or the number of comorbidities present with most Covid deaths.

But yet we have politicians like Andrews who keep pushing the false notion that Covid “does not discriminate” and the virus’ impact is the same whether you are young and healthy or very old and infirm.

This pandemic has exposed the totalitarian tendencies of the catastrophist Left and their willingness to mislead the public if they think it’ll scare them into submission.

IN SHORT

What a coincidence! Sydney gets picnics and suddenly the “science” that informs the Victorian government’s decision-making shifts.