The State of Victoria — More Like a Reincarnation of 1930s Germany
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“One of the idiosyncrasies of Chinese public opinion is that people tend not to blame the emperor. There is a tendency to assume the emperor to be a benevolent being above reproach whose underlings must be the ones at fault. And so it is with attitudes towards Mao.” — Eat the Buddha: Life and death in a Tibetan town. By Barbara Demick. August 2020, pg. 66.
The Victorian government has introduced into the Parliament a bill called “COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020”. Below is the Australian Monarchist League’s Philip Benwell’s
(National Chair) official media release on the matter:
Our Constitution and our system of governance under the Crown has been violated by our state parliaments allowing premiers to assume arbitrary and almost absolute powers hitherto unheard of within our Westminster system of democracy. The fact that the people appear to agree with the measures taken in no way absolves them from assuming such powers. Surely there are more democratic methods of imposing such restrictions.
The Victorian government has introduced into the Parliament a bill called “COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020”
This bill will create “designated authorised officers” who will be tasked with an enormous authority to detain what they may consider to be a “high risk person”. It is assumed that ‘a high-risk person’ is both one who has been notified and diagnosed with COVID-19 and also a “close contact“ of a person who has been diagnosed with COVID-19. However, “designated authorised officers” will also have the power to detain a person who is “likely“ to refuse or fail to refuse a direction even if they have done nothing wrong other than to question the authority of these officers. The bill also empowers courts to remove children from their parents and place those children “in or out of home care” for longer periods than legislation currently allows.
In the 1930s the Nazi party established its ‘’Sturmabteilung (Assault Division) otherwise known as ’Brownshirts’ whose methods of controlling the crowds played a key role in consolidating party rule.
Now, I am not saying that the ‘DAO’ (designated authorised officers) will be anything remotely like the Nazi storm troopers, but the very existence of such people, who will acting under political and not police authority, bears a strong resemblance. Such legislation is abhorrent to democracy and any member of the Victorian Parliament who supports the bill will be culpable.
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“Two aspects of the law are particularly abhorrent.
The first is the power it gives the government to authorise anyone it chooses to exercise — without oversight, accountability, or the right of appeal — the draconian powers of Victoria’s health regulations, which include arrest, detention, entry into homes and workplaces without a warrant, and the seizure of property.
The second is the power it gives to those so authorised by the government to arrest and indefinitely detain a person who is suspected of being someone who could potentially breach the health regulations.
Such a law has no place anywhere in Australia, ever.
This week, in a powerful statement to the Victorian Parliament, fourteen of Melbourne barristers, including QCs Michael Borsky, Stuart Wood AM, Philip Crutchfield, Georgina Schoff, and former High Court judge Michael McHugh AC, wrote: “Authorising citizens to detain their fellow citizens on the basis of a belief that the detained person is unlikely to comply with emergency directions by the ‘authorised’ citizens is unprecedented, excessive and open to abuse.”
“Institute of Public Affairs research and analysis has identified that the COVID Omnibus Bill is the most significant violation of human rights in Australian history for three key reasons:
- The COVID Omnibus Bill would give the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services the ability to appoint any person to be an ‘authorised officer’ who would have the authority to exercise arbitrary and draconian powers without accountability or oversight,
- The COVID Omnibus Bill would give authorised officers the power to indefinitely detain Victorians based on subjective criteria, and
- The COVID Omnibus Bill would abolish the ancient right of habeas corpus.”
“In recent days, even voices within the World Health Organisation are becoming part of the reckoning. “We really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other,” said WHO coronavirus special envoy David Nabarro.
Speaking to Andrew Neil on Spectator TV, Nabarro said that global poverty levels may double by next year, and there may be more than a doubling of child malnutrition. “Lockdowns have just one consequence that you must never, ever belittle — and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has added his name to the Great Barrington Declaration that calls for an end to lockdowns while devoting far greater resources to protecting the vulnerable.
He describes lockdowns as a “terrible experiment”. Speaking to Spiked Online last week, he said: “One of the basic principles of public health is that you do not just look at one disease — you have to look at health as a whole, including all kinds of diseases, over a long period. That is not what has been done with COVID-19.
“As a public health scientist, it is stunning to see how focused people are on this one disease and the short term. The collateral damage is tragic: cardiovascular disease outcomes are worse, cancer screenings are down and there are mental-health issues, for example. The current approach does not make sense. We sought to flatten the curve in the spring so as not to overload hospitals, and that succeeded in almost every country. But trying to suppress the disease with contact tracing, testing and isolation, together with severe lockdowns, is not going to solve the problem. It will just push things into the future.”