Australia’s Prime Minister is known for emoting and for pursuing nothingburger public policy issues (the voice, the republic, climate emergencies) – issues aptly described as “solutions in search of problems” – while ignoring our real national problems (where to start? Book-length treatment required).
But he did promise a serious inquiry inro Australia’s Covid response. Whatever happened to that? Sky News reports:
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised a royal commission-style inquiry into Australia’s response to COVID-19 – yet it was “nowhere to be seen” in the recent budget, according to Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell.
“Now I understand there was an informal discussion between premiers last year when it was roundly decided that there were issues in the health system arising out of the pandemic that needed to be addressed first before any pandemic inquiry,” Mr Clennell said.
“It’s also been put to me that two premiers who might not be that enthusiastic about a royal commission at the moment were Annastacia Palaszczuk and Daniel Andrews.”
In an absolute cesspit of government and corporate malfeasance and bungling, clueless incompetence from 2020 to 2023, perhaps the worst thing to have happened is the apparent decision not to investigate the cesspit of government and corporate malfeasance and bungling, clueless incompetence.
Maybe the clue to the “nothing to see here” approach of the Albanese regime is in Sky’s last paragraph. An inquiry would be most inconvenient for the Unspellable Premier and the Dictator of MelDanistan. Not to mention the guy from Perth. (Anthony Albanese doesn’t have anything personally to fear from any inquiry. He was in opposition at the time. Yes, compliant due to his silence on all the Covid crimes being committed around him. But not personally liable. There must be other, political reasons for his reticence).
All the other Covid goons have, perhaps mercifully, perhaps not, departed the scene. Sadly, none of them faced the ire of a forensic Royal Commissioner and Counsel Assisting. Berejiklian. Perrottet. Gunner of Darwin. The South Australian stooge. The forgotten Tasmanian. Worst of all, the simply awful ScoMo. They packed their bags, or their voters did for them, and they headed for the hills. Worst of all, none of them were sent packing for their Covid crimes. Our electorates just aren’t that awake. No, they all had other baggage weighing them down. Our last chance was a Royal Commission. The Nuremberg 2.0 opportunity much touted by the Covid outsiders.
An entire generation of non-leaders of the political class allowed themselves to be manoeuvred into the most evil and disastrous decisions in our history. Whose impact on us all, they still fail to acknowledge. Anyone not truly disgusted by all of this is missing something deep in his or her soul and mind. And yet it has been a classic Thurberesque Day-the-Dam-Broke response by just about all concerned. Too many people are invested in not wishing to talk about the Covid madness. The Cult. The hysteria. The crimes and misdemeanours that killed people needlessly. 2023 is the Year of Nothing to See Here.
The recent decision by a Victorian judge to let off the VicPol cop who smashed an innocent protester’s head into the floor at Flinders Street Station during one of that State’s many lockdowns sums up where we have got to.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/its-time-to-resist-the-call-to-move-on-from-covid/
If that is deemed to have been ok, what else wouldn’t also be so deemed?
If any country needed to inquire into its Covid response, it is Australia. With North Korea and Cuba, we were the only one to stop citizens leaving. We were the country about which overseas people were most shaking their heads over submissive obeisance to Covid totalitarianism. Americans and Brits just didn’t understand it. We were unique in creating a formal alternate governmental process (called the National Cabinet) that replaced parliaments and accountable decision making. We had the army in the streets. We had military police hunting the innocent. We had curfews and house arrest. We had internal border closures.
We also had just about zero deaths at the height of Covid in 2020-21. Until the vaccine mandates and brutal vaccine marketing arrived in late 2021. Then more people started dying in more serious numbers! It is one of history’s starker correlations. Unexplained deaths (we ask)? Huge spikes in excess deaths? No, still nothing to see here.
If for no other reason, we need a Royal Commission just to remind ourselves of all the madness. And that the madness cost people their lives, jobs, careers, businesses, goodbyes to loved ones, friendships. Oh yes, it was divisive. A mere virus – quite possibly simple influenza rebadged to fund a sinister and profitable, Gatesian global vax campaign – was able to render families and friendships permanently split in ways that even climate change, same sex marriage, the Voice or Brexit couldn’t. Yes, many do want to punish people. And only consider forgiveness after an admission of criminal culpability. But those given to ponder these things also want all the stages and cases of the insanity recorded so as to be remembered. Remembered with clear minds the next time the fascists come for us.
As Joshua Philipps of The Epoch Times sums it up neatly:
… it seems they’re hoping the public simply forgets what actually took place.
Lest we forget. You might say that the political class is simply hoping to ride the (late American economist) Anthony Downs’ “issue attention cycle” – where even the most important political issues have a limited shelf life, and eventually just go away – to the beach.
The other great line of the Covid class, literally from the mouth of Anthony Fauci, is:
Nothing was done perfectly.
Yes, he really wrote that, in a New York Times “puff piece”, as Philipps calls it. This is the “we did our best” excuse. “If only we knew then …” Do we really want to let them get away with this tosh? I suspect this type of thinking is alive and well among the Australian political establishment.
One of the greatest symptoms of “forgetting” (and the new Australian insouciance) has been noted by Jeffrey Tucker:
We are back to pretending that the people and not the Faucis of the world are in charge.
https://brownstone.org/articles/after-covid-twelve-challenges-for-shattered-world/
The people are far less in charge now than we were three years ago. And we weren’t remotely in charge then. Assuming that the Covid totalitarian moment was just another event, and has now passed into history, would be a fatal error. Remember that history rhymes, even if it doesn’t repeat (as Mark Twain suggested).
Then there is Covid fatigue militating against popular resistance. Jeffrey Tucker again:
… people are tired and demoralized and more than ready for normal life again. But we cannot simply wish away the ugly truths all around us.
Things are no better stateside. As Tucker notes:
Congress holds hearings on the pandemic response and that’s great. But the mass media does not cover them. A brutalized population does not want to revisit the trauma. There has been and will likely not be any real accountability much less a Nuremberg 2.0.
Does anyone think that, were an inquiry actually to be held here, the corporate media so in thrall (and often in financial debt) to the Covid perpetrators, would actually report it? The fact checkers who endlessly and chillingly hover atop the search engines would rubbish its findings. A few Covid heroes in the Parliament – there are only a few, and our current Prime Minister certainly isn’t one of them – actually did conduct an unofficial inquiry of sorts a little while back. No one in voterland heard about it.
Which questions should most occupy the minds of some (highly unlikely) future inquiry?
The first agenda item should be to abandon the easy, default sin of false binarism. Making everything a choice of stuff-up versus conspiracy can be futile and fatal distraction. Yes, the motivations of placeholder puppet-pollies, public health gauleiters, media saboteurs, corrupt academic grant-seekers, careerist doctors in the pay of drug companies, Covid-fanatical NGOs and neighbourhood Stasi-snitchers are important. The motivations of Big Pharma and Big Tech we already know. And we know about the creation of waves of new billionaires in what Robert F Kennedy Jr and others have recognised to have been the greatest wealth transfer from the outsider class to the insiders in history. No motivational mystery there. But we can put the culprits in jail without needing to explore these.
And punishment must be the immediate goal. Aka accountability. Explaining remote causes can come later. As the Brownstone Institute states:
These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history. They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalize the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties, and truth.
… The people who implemented this Hell remain in power, and they appear unremorseful.
https://brownstone.org/articles/15-days-finally-ends-after-1141-days/
So, the immediate goal is to identify crimes, put the perpetrators on the stand, enjoy their inevitable squirming and punish the guilty. And to compensate the injured, those that are lucky enough to be still alive.
Jeffrey Tucker has identified some core American questions that might well be asked/adapted in Australia:
Vast efforts on the part of Brownstone writers are spent getting the history of this correct. Precisely when was Covid spreading? When did US officials know? When was the response mapped out and who was involved? Who decided to transfer authority over to the security state? What tools did the federal government use to coerce the states? Why the neglect of natural immunity? How did repurposed drugs get deprecated and why?
There are thousands of questions, many of which are mapped out in the independent Norfolk Group document that Brownstone supported. There are commissions needed in every nation, state, city, and county. We need answers. We’ve discovered many features of the response and the truth about the truths and strategies but we have a very long way to go.
We need answers, indeed. See The Norfolk Group’s core questions here.
https://www.norfolkgroup.org/
It is so important to get the history correct. In one place. On the official record. But a Royal Commission might also shed light on meta-issues, so as to begin to reverse course and commence the long and winding road back to sane, non-corrupt governance. With an eye to the future. Five issues on my list are as follows:
· The worship of scientism;
· The reflexive urge to censor dissidents and stifle debate;
· Executive government creep, in secrecy;
· The treason of the medicos;
· How Covid became a woke issue.
This is only a start.
With apologies to all those who are currently focusing with all their might on the voice, the republic, the prospect of mass immigration, and all of the other important-in-normal-times issues that are dangerous but not game-ending, I would say, there is another elephant in the room here. We simply cannot allow the political class to re-write the history of Covid. They took almost everything we had. They lied about almost everything. Getting away with that, then simply looking away afterwards, and assuming that merely ending the Covid State restrictions and mandates will earn our everlasting gratitude, demands a little more than a national shoulder shrug. And far more than a pandemic amnesty for the guilty parties.
If nothing more happens, expect the formation of parallel societies, mass disengagement from the mainstream system, civil disobedience, the further emergence of fringe groups (that will automatically be branded neo-Nazis), rampant tax avoidance absent any perceived remnants of a social contract, and far more cynicism than we have even now, when at each election around a third of Australians don’t vote at all, vote informally or vote for anyone-but-the-major parties.
Allowing spivs and thugs to tiptoe away from a crime is most unseemly for the polity. And our self-respect as citizens.
Paul Collits
17 May 2023
Great article.
Has anybody compiled a video montage of the Australian politicians, medical experts, CHOs, newsreaders, religious leaders, celebrities…. and the threats, lies, coercion, hatred that we witnessed for 3 years?
The national amnesia is mind-blowing. Everything back to normal! Without question!
We go from lockdowns and vaccine passports to nothing…..surely people are at least curious?
I already expect nothing to happen and am actively working on a parallel economy. The corruption is so pervasive and deep that I fear it is unfixable. The social contract broke for me totally during the vaxfest and there is no going back for me now.