In his famous political discourse, The Republic, Plato deemed tyranny the “fourth and worst disorder of a state”. Tyrants lack “the very faculty that is the instrument of judgment: reason”. As explained by the American Constitutional Rights Foundation, the tyrannical man is enslaved because the best part of him (reason) is enslaved and, likewise, the tyrannical state is enslaved, because it too lacks reason and order.
Listening to the West Australian Premier, Mark McGowan, during the past year (and especially the past week), it would seem he has developed the tyrannical hallmark of a lack of reason that Plato described. Last Sunday, McGowan hit the panic button to put more than two million West Australians in lockdown over just one case, a security guard from hotel quarantine. No other positive cases have been confirmed.
A typical characteristic of tyranny is hubris. McGowan says repeatedly he wants to “crush the disease”. He declared on January 8: “We need to eliminate it. We are an island. We need to use our advantages to eliminate the virus. The idea that you keep the virus ticking along, and you close down postcodes or you deal with a cafe or a restaurant here or a suburb there, I don’t think is right.”
This was his justification for the knee-jerk reaction to shut off WA from the east over Christmas, heartlessly separating families once more. Once a hotel security guard tested positive, the “hard border” policy was finally exposed for the baloney it always was. In Victorian-style incompetence, the guard was allowed to moonlight as a rideshare driver and may not have always been appropriately attired in full PPE while in the hotel.
Cockiness is no substitute for preparedness. In Western Australia, a QR code check-in system was not implemented until December 5, and mandatory daily testing for hotel quarantine workers was introduced on January 29 — weeks, if not months, after the other states had these systems in place. That is why they have shut their borders to Western Australia, but not Victoria, which also had a hotel quarantine worker test positive this week.
McGowan’s excuse is that of a lazy student: It’s a big job and these things take time. Even if the lockdown ends today, some restrictions will remain.
In fact, McGowan was warned repeatedly that Western Australia had to be better prepared. That wasn’t hard. As David Flint wrote recently in The Spectator, all the politicians needed to do was follow world’s-best practice as exhibited by Taiwan. More than 900 Australians have died (130 times the number of deaths in Taiwan) because politicians here, such as McGowan, have the hubris to think they can eliminate a virus. In imposing these lockdowns, we are told that this is the “health advice” so we must follow it. Such advice has never been made public and goes against proper evidence-based research done by real infectious diseases experts, such as those at Stanford University, who wrote last month in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation that the costs of lockdowns (health and economic) vastly outweigh any potential benefits. McGowan has displayed here two further characteristics of tyranny: secrecy and deception.
Another hallmark of tyranny is hypocrisy. McGowan told the state parliament on March 18 last year: “If we close the borders to the east what will happen to our markets of products and supply chains for important goods?” Health Minister Roger Cook added: “Well, there is this little thing called the Constitution … we cannot turn around and say one Australian cannot meet and visit another Australian.”
Perhaps McGowan’s most frightening statement was that he believed the Victorian approach was the template to adopt if an outbreak were to occur in WA. This is now what he has done. This week no one was married, the dead remained unburied and the school holidays have been extended. Masks must be worn indoors and outdoors in searing heat in a city that is bigger in area than Greater London, with nowhere near the same population density. All just for one case. Total control over our lives would suit McGowan perfectly, and if he wins control of both houses of the state parliament after the March 13 election, it may become a reality. Additionally, in true Daniel Andrews style, McGowan has launched an inquiry to find out how the hotel quarantine system failed and what improvements can be made. Even the feeble Coate inquiry was able to work that out. Common sense might also help.
McGowan may be following his own interpretation of Niccolo Machiavelli’s advice about the usefulness of fear for rulers. In his 16th century political treatise The Prince, he wrote: “It is much safer to be feared than loved because … love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”
Fearmongering, rather than fear (as Machiavelli described), may well win McGowan the election, but the consequences of such an outcome for good governance cannot be understated. The Ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles understood this more than 2500 years ago when, in Oedipus Rex, he wrote:
The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his
sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest
headlong
He plummets to the dust
of hope.
Rocco Loiacono is a senior lecturer at Curtin University Law School.
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