Is Australia’s health dictatorship starting to crack?

Is the dictatorship of the chief health officers across Australia on the verge of breaking down?

After a wobbly start back in February last year when the prime minister – very briefly – seemed to be in command when he closed the international border, first to China and then to the world, every state and territory and so the entire nation by default has been under the iron grip of a cabal of CHOs.

For more than 15 months, their word has been quite literally law – backed up and enforced by states of emergency which have given governments authoritarian powers, which they have executed with relish, all as never before seen in Australia in peacetime.

There has been only one target – eliminate the virus – at quite literally any cost in terms of both financial and other health consequences.

Each decision to destroy jobs and businesses, and sacrifice mental and (other) physical health has been rationalised and justified on the basis of “following the – always undisclosed – health advice”.

That’s to say, bluntly, when a CHO said “jump”, political government responded “how high” – and, “for how long”.

Maybe the first crack in the CHO iron grip went more substantively unappreciated, albeit widely mocked at the time, when a month ago SA’s CHO Prof Nicola Spurrier warned “not to touch the football”.

That did not get turned into a SA government order, backed up by on-the-spot fines. That seems to have been the first, and first clearly disclosed, “health advice” not followed.

This was followed by Queensland’s CHO (and governor-select) Jeannette Young’s hysterical outburst against the Astra-Zeneca vaccine - which she seemingly did not appreciate actually made a very powerful case against both vaccinating the majority of the population (the under 40s) and the lockdowns mandated by her and the other CHOs.

But the biggest crack is clearly the now disclosed opposition this week from NSW’s treasurer Dominic Perrottet to the extension of NSW’s current lockdown.

To my mind this is the first time we have seen any opposition inside a cabinet in any state not simply to the lockdown strategy, but by undeniable implication opposition also to that cardinal rule that has had Australian in an iron grip.

Self-evidently the premier and co were “following the health advice” in committing to a further lockdown. The treasurer was prepared to not follow it.

We are also seeing a growing number of voices attacking either the entire lockdown/elimination strategy or certainly its continuation now.

It’s not just the supposed extremists of the Murdoch media – like The Australian’s Adam Creighton and Sky News’s Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones.

Yesterday we even got two columns in separate Nine publications, from Chris Uhlmann and John Kehoe, lacerating, absolutely lacerating the lockdown/elimination strategy and by implication the dictatorship of the CHOs.

How’s this from Kehoe? “Yet our scare-mongering politicians and bureaucrats have terrified millions of relatively healthy and non-elderly people…….”

And from Uhlmann: “Forget limiting the amount of death, COVID-19 became the only disease in history that no Australian is allowed to catch.”

Interestingly – very “interestingly” – in this context of “follow the health advice without the slightest deviation”, was Uhlmann’s reference to up to 44,000 people each year in Australia “killed or maimed by their doctors and nurses”.

All this becomes very active, in real time, when we do get more pervasive vaccination; but also, by implication, still significant levels of non-vaccination.

Will we accept cases and even deaths?

Will we still be “following the health advice”?