So, following the inquiry by Judge Virginia Bell, Albo has done the obvious political thing and moved to censure the former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, for assuming additional portfolios during the Covid “pandemic”, more or less without telling anyone.
As the Guardian reports:
We now have three new adjectives for the saga of Scott Morrison’s secret, multiple ministries: “unnecessary”, “exorbitant”, and “bizarre”.
Those are the words of former High Court Justice, Virginia Bell, whose meticulous report lays waste to Morrison’s justifications for his break-glass-in-case-of-emergency powers.
Bell was able to pull it all together despite only perfunctory communication with Morrison through his lawyers – who mostly pointed to his public comments on the matter and added the improbable claim that he thought the ministries would be announced on the government gazette.
Bell found that “difficult to reconcile” with Morrison’s choice not to inform his ministers of the appointments because he didn’t want them to think he was second-guessing them.
See also:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-28/censure-motion-scott-morrison-parliament-go-ahead/101705568
Doesn’t Albanese look suitably somber?
Mr Albanese said the report was a “scathing” indictment of Mr Morrison and his actions were “extraordinary, unprecedented and wrong”
“We’re shining sunlight on a shadow government that preferred to operate in darkness, a government that operated in a cult of secrecy and a culture of cover up, which arrogantly dismissed scrutiny from the parliament and the public as a mere inconvenience,” Mr Albanese said.
This exercise is absurd. Or is it? Hang the former Government for a minor crime made to sound like a major crime, and so avoid having them and we-the-then-opposition face a real inquiry into the actual Covid crimes of the Government, of the National Cabinet and of the State and Territory tinpot dictatorships. Including Albo’s Labor mates in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin, Covid totalitarians all and with far greater crimes on their records than ScoMo. Considered this way, it is a classic “look over there” feint. Morrison, yesterday’s man, will totally escape the wrath of the Covid State’s victims, and sail off into the sunset with a slap on the wrist for a relatively minor offence. Albanese will look, for a moment, “prime ministerial”. No one will notice his own murderous culpability.
Equally absurd, of course, is the Opposition’s “defence” of its Covid policy responses, including Morrison’s frankly weird portfolio gambit. We were stressed. Once in a century pandemic. Fog of ignorance. Novel virus. All of this is self-serving, baseless tosh. There is no defence of Morrison’s many Covid sins. None whatsoever. To attempt this defence, as a few Liberals like Dan Tehan have done, is to insult our intelligence. (Although given the apparently low intelligence of the average Australian voter, it might well work).
Morrison’s crime isn’t a storm in a teacup. There is something called due process in our Cabinet Government, and that is important. It was ignored by Morrison. This is not the problem with the censure motion. Nor is it the case that Morrison and his appalling Government don’t have anything over which to be censured, Covid policy wise. God help us – where to start?
We could start with the ban on Australian citizens from leaving their country. Or returning. We could mention the disastrous creation of the National Cabinet, a far greater breach of governance norms than ScoMo’s piddling portfolio play. We might mention ScoMo’s slithering over vaccine mandates. Or his endorsement of Daniel Andrews, who ordered his military police to shoot innocent people in the back with rubber bullets, to arrest mothers who had put dissident views on Facebook, to close playgrounds in order to prevent adults from congregating, and to smash the heads of innocents on concrete floors. Or his Government’s acceptance of his bureaucrats’ banning of effective Covid treatments that would have saved lives. Or his sleazy deals with Big Pharma. Or his Government’s use of the vile Biosecurity Act that caused at least some ministers brief pause. Or his funding support for Covid camps. Or his silence when half a million citizens turned up in Canberra in February 2022 to plead for release from our lockdown and vaccine bondage.
None of these sins are mentioned in the ritualistic execution of him for the much lesser crime of secretly taking on extra ministries.
Albanese’s own Covid sins are monumental. Like most oppositions across the globe during Covid, the Australian Labor Party stood against the people in order to score easy political points, doing nothing to defend individual freedom and rights. They were just as much part of the Covid establishment as the governments of the day. Convenient. Self-serving. Cowardly.
As a result, there has been a critical, possibly permanent, breach of trust between the state and the citizenry. The social contract has been broken, and broken inexorably. Nothing in our lifetimes comes close. The governing class has proven that it cares not for the rights, freedoms and welfare of its people. That many of the governed in Australia were sufficiently frightened to seem to be quite willing to submit to totalitarian control in order to benefit from the State’s false promise of protection from the “deadly” virus is quite beside the point.
A most eloquent and erudite analysis of how this breach occurred was delivered in the recent Menzies Oration by Lord Jonathan Sumption, the retired British Supreme Court Judge and history scholar.
Sumption’s speech was titled “state of fear”. It was a tour de force. It was perceptive explanation of the emergence of the Covid State, delivered (not ironically) in MelDanistan. What the democratic state inflicted on its people should never be forgiven, or forgotten. Sumption’s account of previously “unthinkable” impositions on the citizenry during Covid, in what amounted to a Hobbesian police state where citizens became mere instruments of state control, says everything that needs to be said about the sheer emptiness of Albanese’s convenient and cynical gesture in the Australian Parliament this week. Our sense of the rule of law has been trashed. I fear that few if any of the parliamentarians excoriating ScoMo will have the remotest sense of the damage than has been done to the polity during the Covid hysteria. Our parliamentary democracy lies in ruins. Will anyone in Canberra even have noticed?
If you thought the Covid theatre was over, just watch this farce unfold. Serving the needs of the political class. Certainly not those of the people.
Other nations at least might be disposed to hunt down the Covid policy villains and punish them. As the legendary American economist and policy analyst David Stockman at the Brownstone Institute says (in relation to his own country):
Let the real investigations begin.
Yes, please. Stockman states:
Now that the GOP has taken control of the US House investigative committees, we must pray that they will have the courage of their convictions and the intellectual clarity and steadfastness to pursue the nation’s god-forsaken descent into public health totalitarianism to the very bottom of this great folly. So doing, they need to name names.
Stated differently, the unspeakable stain of the Covid tyranny requires the very opposite of the “pandemic amnesty” that the craven poltroons at the Atlantic suggested recently. That’s because the precedent was such a grave affront to constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity that those responsible should be exposed, hounded and shamed, and prosecuted where warranted, so that future power-grabbers will forever be reminded that tyranny cannot be imposed with impunity.
https://brownstone.org/articles/let-the-real-investigations-begin/
Indeed, we can all hope that the once mighty United States does what we seem palpably unable to do. Instead, down under, we have a tepid, feeble attempt to skirt the big issue, to ignore the elephant in the room, while castigating mice. Yes, we have named a name – Scott Morrison. Whoop-de-do. But we still seem unable or unwilling to nail the perpetrators of the greatest crimes against liberty in modern history. Just the opposite, in fact. One of our populous states, that unspeakable place south of the Murray, has just rewarded the worst dictator of them all by re-electing him to a third term of office. Go figure.
And the only censure motion during Covid in the Australian Parliament was against one of the very, very few freedom fighters in the parliament, George Christensen. One of the lone public figures in this country who actually recognised how sinister the Covid responses were, and had the clear headedness and courage to call it out. That was a national disgrace. That the Liberal Party, the Party of the same Menzies honoured by Lord Sumption – and the National Party joyously joined in the attack on Christensen suggests either that they had no comprehension of what they were doing to the people of Australia and its institutions, or they simply did not care.
So, we should not expect any remorse from them. Instead, just more theatre. This speaks volumes for just how little our politicians think of us. They act like this was just another issue, just another policy. Nothing to see here.
That a whole generation of parliamentarians, with virtually no honourable exceptions, cannot see the damage that has been done to the polity through their own malfeasance – the kindest word I can find for their behaviour – should cause voters and the media to shake their heads in disbelief. Lord Sumption calls it “corrosive” of democracy and sees the damage as permanent. It is that serious. Instead, the gnomes of The Guardian start laying into Morrison (via Twitter) for his defence of his portfolios putsch. Possibly they also cannot see that the current censure exercise is a farce and a distraction and that we need a real inquiry into the Covid madness. Or possibly they choose not to, since they too are implicated in the self-same hysteria. Indeed, they themselves generated much of it.
This cabal of politicians has silenced their people. They have neutered us. They no longer deserve our collaboration, let alone our respect. In trashing the social contract on which our system of liberal democracy is based, they have, unwittingly, released us from our bond of political obligation. Such an environment is highly charged and potentially dangerous.
And they have the gall to bang on about “voices”.
Paul Collits
1 December 2022
I think they don't know how to be in government as they still have the mindset of an opposition after so many years there.
All they do is attack the opposition.
Wake up Labor they don't have the votes to do anything.
Get off your backsides and start working as a government to bring down the cost of living that is killing us all. We couldn't care less how many ministries Scomo held during a period where the health minister could have used the emergency powers to over rule the PM. No wonder he needed the backup position, just in case Greg Hunt went mad and followed his leader Klaus Schwab at the WEF.
The start of the current situation started with Gough Whitlam - elected 1972. Their is a YouTube video called the men who stole government. It describes the 3 days after he was elected and before he was sworn in where Gough and a couple of trusted friends unilaterally altered hundreds of pieces and of legislation. Further to that he wrote the Australian constitution in which he removed “ we the people”. Later adopted in 1986. In 1975 he signed the Lima agreement. In that agreement if you read this t 26 countries signed and they were all sworn to secrecy from their own constituents. Since that time we have been having a shadow government run by the UN . The Un agenda 2030 sealed our fate. The Roman Dean episode from last night 2/12/22 explains a what of what the labour movement considers his achievements, we’re not. The belief that we can elect people to change our situation is an illusion of democracy. The creation of national cabinet is another form of shadow govt- which still persist within the current govt. Face it there was no mandate for the current govt to sign us up at G 20 for international IT identity or the last govt to sign us up to the WHO pandemic treaty amendments- which looks very much like the G20 agreement. Nor was there any mandate to give be billions in reparations to the UN for climate change. Think outside the box the bigger picture is soul destroying.the recently passed IR bill will advance the destruction of small business and Dr estate the middle class- a WEF objective. In 1986 Kim Beasley took a dorothy dixer from senator Button asking what would happen when Australia became a republic- the answer was “we would belong to the UN” ( that can be found in Hansard) . A month before the referendum on a republic the UN passed a motion that when we became a republic we would be the first country “owned” by the Un. The fact Dan got re- elected is a reflection of how comfortable the sheepies have become with us gradually becoming a socialist welfare state where people trust government too much to look after them.