The writer is in Australia
IT HAS been a busy Covid week or so in Australia, and the news has been decidedly mixed.
As some of us (probably not many) brace for the hyped ‘fifth wave’, we have reports of the government collaborating with social media companies to shut down Covid dissidents. Mr Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi, calls them Australia’s ‘creepy Covid cops’.
The Australian branch of the Censorship Industrial Complex is well and truly active. As Taibbi notes: ‘Through a freedom of information request, a conservative Australian senator named Alex Antic revealed that the country’s Department of Home Affairs between 2017 and 2022 made 13,636 referrals to digital platforms to review content against their own terms of service. Of those, 9,000 were terrorism-related, but a full 4,213 were listed as “Covid-19 related” referrals.’
Alex Antic is a star, one of not very many in the Australian Parliament. He has been a relentless champion of the vaccine-injured, as well as having sound views on a range of issues (digital identity, the surveillance state, spiking excess deaths post the vaccine rollout, the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation Pandemic Treaty) as well as the courage to pursue them. He is one of the few attempting to inject some spine into the Liberal Party of which he is a member.
Racket News has delved deeper: ‘During the Covid-19 crisis, the Australian government appears to have taken the same approach as its Five Eyes cousins, freely mixing concepts of violent extremism and “social cohesion” with legitimate concerns of citizens regarding government panic, lack of expertise, and overreach. From our review, little to none of the content that was flagged came from “extremists”. Rather it was and is from everyday Australians and foreigners who disagreed with government policy. Some of their claims are indeed far-out and/or at least esoteric, but “characters” are part of life, and being unusual doesn’t justify a dragnet approach to censorship.’
Racket News’s analysis makes sobering reading. It is pretty scary that the person in charge of all this has the job title ‘Senior Analyst, Extremism Insights and Communication’. The Aussie deep state is deep indeed. And ever so slightly alarming is the fact that the Minister for Home Affairs during this surveillance regime was one Peter Dutton, now leader of the Liberal Party and His Majesty’s Opposition.
We also have news of a class action, Australia’s first, on behalf of Covid vaccine victims. As Rebekah Barnett (Dystopian Down Under) notes: ‘The Class Action seeks to hold the TGA [Australia’s equivalent of the MHRA] to account for alleged negligence, breach of statutory duty and misfeasance in public office in its failure to properly approve and monitor the Covid vaccines, resulting in harms to Australians. Class Action respondents include, but are not limited to, the Australian Government, the Department of Health and Aged Care Secretary Dr Brendan Murphy, and the Former Deputy Secretary of Health Products Regulation Group Adjunct Professor John Skerritt.’
In other news, last week we learned that Australia’s promised Covid inquiry is ‘nowhere to be seen’. This is a setback for truth-seekers, but not unexpected, as so many in the political class have so much to cover up. They are sticking to the tired narrative – we did our best, maybe made some mistakes, but what we did was for the public benefit and based on all the information we had at the time – and they have no intention of letting it go.
Last but not least, we come to the Victorian Budget. Oh dear. The place is going broke post-Covid. Victoria’s state debt in 2022-23 is $117billion and projected to rise to $171billion by 2026-27. Victoria, of course, is infamous the world over for Covid ‘measures’ that made even the Chinese blush. Now Victorians have to pay the bill. For all that economic locking down, for the house arrests, for shooting protesters in the back with rubber bullets, for head-slamming at Flinders St Station, Melbourne, for attacking grannies, for stopping kids playing in the park, for awarding hotel quarantine contracts to his mates, for the military police, for the curfews, and for the vaccine mandates. Hence we have the Ten Year Covid Levy to pay the ‘Covid debt’.
Perhaps Victorians, who rewarded Premier Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Andrews with a thumping majority at the election last November after nearly three years of needless misery and worse, might now be having a few lightbulb moments. We can always hope. Though it is said, uncharitably, that Victorians are proof that Tasmanians can swim (Australian in-joke). They are certainly a woke, green, progressive lot. There is literally no conservative opposition there, making Victoria a one-party State.
Shortly Andrews will have a statue erected in his honour, for achieving three thousand days in office in February 2023. The Guardian, marking the occasion, noted Andrews’s social reforms ‘including the introduction of voluntary assisted dying laws, safe access zones for abortion clinics, a ban on gay conversion practices, landmark royal commissions into family violence and mental health, and the nation’s first process of negotiating a treaty with First Nations people.’
You get the picture. Locking up his people for months on end for a virus and then sending them the bill is merely the icing on the Andrews cake.
All in all, at least some of Australia’s Covid chickens are roosting. Who knows what will become of the class action or of Senator Antic’s revelations? At least the costs of the Covid policy disaster down under, not to mention some of its more sinister elements like the silencing of dissent, might just be beginning to ease into the public consciousness. But with the political class still looking the other way and continuing their lies, there is still quite a ways to go.
