THREE Australian states are still pursuing a laughably flawed, universal Covid vaccination policy – but with bureaucrats doing the dirty work of sheepish, ever-silent politicians.
In New South Wales, at least one Local Health District is making its staff get a third booster shot, on pain of probable dismissal. Perhaps all of them are.
This is despite the NSW Premier Dominic Perrottets assurances on Sydney radio on June 7 that his government was ending vaccine mandates and had met with top bureaucrats to ask them to do so.
‘They are working through those risk-based assessments and I expect them to come back to me shortly,’ he said. ‘I expect them to implement my direction.’
As I discovered from an emailed memo to staff from the health district’s chief executive officer, NSW Health is not following the Premier’s ‘direction’.
In Queensland, the Education Department is punishing 900 teachers who refused vaccination by docking their pay. Now reinstated, they will lose between 25 and 90 dollars a week for 18 weeks.
This is pure vindictiveness, as Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace (who appears to be utterly without it) sits by and allows the penalties to proceed.
Teachers’ Professional Association secretary Tracy Tully has called the pay docking an ‘outrage’. Sadly, there is no such support from the Health Services Union for the NSW health workers being ordered to get the third jab. Indeed, most trade unions in Australia have spinelessly preferred to follow the ‘Covid safe’ practices of employers than to protect the most basic rights of their members.
Meanwhile in Western Australia, the Police Commissioner is pursuing 70 police officers for the crime of being unvaccinated after they lost a Supreme Court fight on Tuesday.
Senior Constable Ben Falconer had spearheaded the legal challenge, supported by dozens of his colleagues and other workers who were subject to the state’s vaccine mandates, which required about one million people to get the jab before January 1, 2022.
Giving his decision, the semi-literate judge (one Justice Jeremy Allanson) said: ‘The measures that were taken were undoubtedly extraordinary, but that does not establish that they lacked rationality so as, for that reason, to be beyond power.’
While discerning what he meant is a tad difficult, I take it to mean that even if the law is an ass, it is still the law – and it isn’t the judge’s job to even question, let alone overturn, bad law.
As for ‘rational’, the rational actor model of policy went out with the ark. The Covid class of politicians were driven by false faith in ‘experts’ who patently were not. They were driven by panic, fear of electoral retribution in the face of rising deaths on their watch, and by the yearning to be ‘doing something’.
Given all that, they were willing to overturn half a century of settled science in relation to pandemic management. There wasn’t a rational decision-maker in the house. So, no, Judge Allanson, they weren’t being rational, and you might well have said as much.
In three states, we are paying the penalty for nil opposition from political parties not in office who have gone along with the Covid fantasy. Just as we are paying the price for having no opposition from the media outlets who might have been able to stir governments into defending gaslit minorities.
Oh, I forgot – it was the governments themselves that were leading the gaslighting, the silencing of dissent, the dismissal of counter-narratives. The law? Not a single court in Australia has stood up to defend human rights in this country.
What accounts for the continued, spiteful actions of government employers at a time when the whole world now knows that vaccine mandates were delusional? Several plausible hypotheses are suggested:
Ÿ Governments and their overpaid bureaucrats are inherently spiteful.
Ÿ Governments hate being shown up as being grievously wrong.
Ÿ Governments have been encouraged to pursue Covid tyranny by compliant electorates (which, in some cases in Australia, have rewarded Covid fascism handsomely at the polls), and they believe that people are still fundamentally pro-vax.
Ÿ Governments fear a mass revolt from the reluctantly vaccinated, and so wish to keep onside the sheep who went along with the jab narrative, but who now might be having doubts about its efficacy. So they retrospectively punish the recalcitrants.
After all, governments are doing other things to keep the vaccine story going in Australia. Witness the still-playing television and radio adverts urging us on to get further boosters, because ‘vaccines are still the best defence against illness’. Like all the other lies, this too is a shameless prevarication being paid for by the taxpayer.
There is another, simpler, explanation, of course. Governments are doing all this because they can.
I would hate to think that the gauleiter-bureaucrats now punishing their employees actually still believe that the unvaccinated pose a medical threat to the vaccinated. I prefer to believe that they are self-interested butt-coverers, scared of being revealed to be culpable fools with big egos to go with their salaries and power.
The Covid State lives on. A failed state, of course, but one which, relying on raw power, fear and nothing else, is beyond the reach of rational argument and evidence-based policy.
Paraphrasing Mark Steyn, and despite all confirmation that the Covid vaccines were unnecessary, useless and dangerous, it is clear that you cannot reason decision-makers back to sound policy. Force is the only answer.
