Covid-rant Fair Work deputy Lyndall Dean sanctioned

Lyndall Dean has been ordered to undergo training and excluded from full bench cases after comparing vaccine mandates to ‘medical apartheid’.

Fair Work deputy president Lyndall Dean.

A Fair Work Commission deputy president who compared vaccine mandates to “medical apartheid” has been ordered to undergo training, excluded from full bench cases and told she would not be allowed to adjudicate workplace disputes about vaccination.

Fair Work president Iain Ross took the action against Lyndall Dean, who also said she would disqualify herself from hearing vaccination cases on the grounds of bias.

The revelations came hours after Senate estimates heard Ms Dean endorsed a social media post that likened Australia’s Covid response to “Chinese-style totalitarianism” and the Holocaust.

In a recent dissenting judgment, Ms Dean said blanket rules, such as mandating vaccinations for everyone across a whole profession or industry regardless of the actual risk, fail the tests of proportionality, necessity and reasonableness.

“All Australians should vigorously oppose the introduction of a system of medical apartheid and segregation in Australia.

“It is an abhorrent concept and is morally and ethically wrong, and the antithesis of our democratic way of life and everything we value,” she wrote.

Senates estimates heard on Wednesday that Ms Dean wrote she “fully” agreed with a LinkedIn post by soprano and entrepreneur Tania de Jong that the Western world had “faced many seasonal respiratory pandemics before but we have never responded by adopting all the trappings of totalitarianism fuelled by irrationality and fear”.

“We have imported far more from China than the virus – we have imported Chinese-style totalitarian social control mechanisms based upon very selective science,” Ms de Jong wrote.

In the comments sections, Ms Dean wrote: “I fully agree Tania.”