The Covid Bonfire of Civil Liberties ...

and how the civil liberties bodies have been stoking the flames rather than putting them out

One of the many casualties of the War on Covid, apart from truth, and the economy, has been civil liberties.  Nothing is too precious, apparently, to be sacrificed in the war against a virus from which 99.85% of infected people recover, usually without even knowing they had been infected.  So, the right to work, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, democratic power and the medical right to control what goes into your body – all these and more have been trampled under the size-twelves of political authoritarians relishing their self-granted pandemic ‘emergency’ powers in cahoots with their limelight-loving ‘public health’ Svengalis.

The assault on civil liberties has been global and it has been particularly dire in Australia.  We have the Western Australian state Premier living the WA secessionist dream by repelling all who attempt to board the state by land or sea.  Broad-based Vaccine Passports which deny entry to venues from shoe shops to cinemas and libraries are in play in four of Australia’s eight states.  All states have enacted No-Jab-No-Job vax mandates for health care workers, with some state governments expanding them to teachers, emergency services workers and well beyond these occupational categories.  The Victorian franchise of the Little Lockdown Shop of Horrors stocks a novelty range of assorted paramilitary offerings - protest on the streets of Melbourne and you may cop a faceful of pepper-spray, or a rubber bullet or old-fashioned pummeling. 

Some parliaments in Australia have been effectively dissolved for the duration under unelected bureaucrats’ Public Health Orders which deem it unsafe to meet in numbers.  Some state governments have excluded from attending and voting in parliament those representatives who can not, or who refuse out of principle, to show proof of ‘full vaccination’.  Freedom of Information requests for the ‘science’ underpinning Covid restrictions are routinely spiked by governments which fear acute embarrassment at public exposure of the ramblings of their court astrologers posing as public health experts.

The smorgasbord of civil liberties abuses should have been a lay-down-misère for Australia’s usually voluble civil liberties organisations yet they have basically shut up shop.  They, too, have fallen under the manic Covid spell and surrendered to the simple world-view of Covid Hysterics like the Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews - ‘It is not about human rights. It is about human life’, as the Emperor thundered.

Missing-In-Action – The civil liberties guardians in Australia

The national and state branches of the market-leading civil liberties organisations in Australia have been unable to tear themselves away from defending the human rights of their ‘woke’ constituencies to be able to squeeze onto their agenda the serious harm that is being done to our civic and personal freedoms under the cover of a statistically-bloated Covid ‘pandemic’.  They have failed on every civil liberties metric.

Lockdown

Lockdown helps to "curtail a deadly pandemic", according to the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties (NSW CCL), adhering to the foundational myth of lockdown saving lives by ‘stopping the spread’ of a virus, despite lockdown-free Sweden, South Dakota, Tanzania and Belarus (and, latterly, Florida) conclusively showing otherwise.  The NSW CCL do balk, however, at special police powers such as the power to lock down apartment blocks but not because that is wrong in principle but only because the police “do not have the skills and capacity” to make the relevant health assessment.  If a Chief Health Panjandrum deems that Covid ‘hot-spot’ apartments be locked up, placing all residents under literal house arrest, China-style, then police enforcement is justified, apparently.

Curfews and the limiting of outdoor exercise are also regarded by the NSW CCL as disproportionate, as are the steep fines meted out to lockdown miscreants, but criticising only the proportionality of these measures leaves the principle of restrictions on activity, and accompanying penalties, as acceptable, so the NSW CCL is just haggling over the exact civil liberties price to be paid for the fool’s quest of ‘controlling’ a virus.

Australia’s peak civil liberties body, Civil Liberties Australia (CLA), experiences similar discomfort with the suspension of some customary civil liberties norms during lockdown but is likewise prepared to suck it up because once “mass vaccination eases the pandemic”, we can then “restore democracy, civil liberties and human rights to Australians”.  Well, how’s that panning out?  How is the restoration of civil liberties faring after being held hostage to a Hail Mary pass from Gates and co?  We now have fast-tracked, experimental, liability-free, ‘leaky’ vaccines that stop neither infection nor transmission, that don’t appear to be reducing severe (hospitalisation and death) outcomes (their favoured metric) all that much, whose limited efficacy, in any case, rapidly wanes requiring a hamster-wheel of boosters, and which come with an adverse reaction cost well above that of traditional vaccines.  All of this ‘vaccine’ downside whilst Australia is still doing lockdowns (or preparing for same), sacking workers who don’t comply with the jab and denying  social life and shopping to the unjabbed.  Good call, CLA.

Freedom of assembly

Australia’s civil liberties organisations have deep-sixed the democratic right to publicly protest, whilst lockdown is on, those government decisions which impose lockdowns, masks, mandatory vaccinations, etc.  They have thus found themselves on the same page as the former NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who said that the time to protest lockdown is only after lockdown.

Conveniently for governments, declaring a public health ‘emergency’ negates the democratic right to challenge, in public, whether such an ‘emergency’ actually exists.  What if the governments of Australia have got it wrong about Covid?  About the virulence and lethality of the virus (which was always a long way short of apocalyptic)?  About the whole ‘pandemic’ being on statistical life-support from a dodgy PCR test that can’t tell a live infection from a long-dead one, a symptomatic one (aka an unwell person) from an asymptomatic one (aka a healthy person), or SARS-CoV-2 from the influenza virus?  About the necessity and effectiveness of ‘Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions’ or any pharmaceutical ones?  Governments are very good at getting things wrong – including, as we now know in spades, in the field of public health in which they are busily making Inspector Clouseau look like an ace detective.

CLA is a highly selective tribune for freedom of assembly.  Anti-lockdown street demonstrations, during lockdown, are out but, for their pet causes such as Black Lives Matter they are in.  The CLA sees anti-lockdown protesters in the same light of caricature as the rest of the contemporary ‘left’ sees them – as “dangerous, anti-science whack jobs…who put everybody’s health at risk” (Greens Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young), or as “stupid irresponsible bastards!  We are in the middle of a major health crisis and gathering tightly without masks, to promote batshit crazy ideas is INSANTIY!” (Peter FitzSimons), or as “marauding fascist mobs” (no hyperbole there!) engaged in “a frightening show of force” to “stoke suspicion towards vaccines and vaccine mandates” (Socialist Alternative Australia - one of the Trotskyist ‘variants’, evolving from the SWP/IS strain, that I was a member of in the past).  As the Covid-demented and vaxx-zealous ABC Radio National breakfast host, Patricia Karvelas, put it, she was “genuinely shocked that there are that many people stupid enough to protest and spread a virus that might kill them. My brain hurts”.  Therefore, no civil liberties for Deplorables!

Meanwhile, the Dan Andrews political virus which has so sickened civil liberties in Victoria has caused little distress to Liberty Victoria. They do manage to support the right to protest during lockdown - but only if it is 'Covid Safe'.  This means masked-up and with 1.5 metres separation between protesters.  These T&C’s, however, concede too much and reinforce the false premise that Covid is a uniquely deadly threat to all, and that extreme measures and sacrifices in response are thus warranted.

Liberty Victoria’s readiness to support limitations on “human rights protected by [Victoria’s] Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, including the human rights of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly” is, however, predicated on accepting “expert public health advice” recommending such restrictions.  This hands democratically-transparent policy-making to unelected CHOs, CMOs and the lesser public health deities whose Covid hysteria and policy panic has been so economically ruinous, socially destructive and politically debilitating.

Liberty Victoria has a ‘boots-on-the-ground’ auxiliary, Melbourne Activist Legal Support (MALS), a self-described “independent volunteer group of lawyers, human rights advocates, law students and para-legals” which is cut from the same cloth as its better known big brother.  MALS argues that “restrictions upon basic freedoms such as movement and gatherings are sometimes necessary and can be entirely ‘lawful’”, so civil liberties can go take a hike when necessitated by “public health purposes”.

They use the analogy of compulsory seatbelts to make the case for lockdown restrictions but this is a flawed comparison.  Plot the effect of seatbelts on a graph of road traffic accident deaths and the effect is stark but plot any lockdown restriction against any virus metric and the effect is entirely random, failing to alter the natural bell-curve progression of the virus.  Compulsory seatbelts?  Yes.  But lockdown restrictions for a respiratory bug with a survival rate on par with the flu?  Hardly.

Although MALS is no fan of the militarisation of the Victorian police, the problem they have with it is not that it smacks of a police state but that it could lead to “distrust in public health authorities” whose magnificent efforts to put the virus back into its box are all that stands in the way of mass viral carnage.  Instead, frets MALS, police over-reaction will send its discontented victims, who don’t understand that this is all for their own benefit, scurrying down rabbit-holes of “baseless conspiracy misinformation on the Internet” (whereas the propaganda from trusted’ media sources, state and corporate, is to be swallowed uncritically).

Nor will MALS have a bar of dissenters against the hegemonic Covid narrative trying to present themselves as some sort of minority facing scapegoating, discrimination and persecution.  No, that honour belongs only to the constituencies that matter, what MALS designates as the "structurally oppressed" groups i.e. population minorities as determined by skin pigmentation, ethnic origin or sexual identity, helpfully itemised by MALS as “First Nations, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples; refugees or asylum seekers; migrant communities; people of colour; or LGBT+ communities”.  These are the ‘deserving’ minorities allowed to assemble, unlike opponents of lockdown or mandatory medical experimentation who are ‘undeserving’ minorities.

Mask mandates

The Gospel of the Mask in the Authorised Version of the Holy Covid Bible is also proselytised by Australia’s civil liberties groups.  The CLA fully supports mask mandates, believing that the bacterial petri-dishes and toxic CO2-traps should be imposed on all, despite abundant evidence that neither the made-in-China supermarket cloth mask, nor the slightly superior surgical mask, do anything at all against a virus (quick quiz – what does it tell us about the circulation of potentially virus-laded air when our glasses steam up whilst wearing a mask?) whilst posing their own health risks ranging from the dermatological to the periodontal, from brain-fogging oxygen-deprivation to bacterial pneumonia.

Leaving aside the science, though, it remains wrong on civil liberties principle to mandate masks.  People who believe that masks work, or who at least gain some psychological benefit from them, should be free to wear them but those who regard them as useless placebos, or as a means of political obedience training, should be able to bare-facedly take their exceptionally good chances with the virus.  The right of every person to make their own health decisions is, or should be, a fundamental civil liberty that protects against government overreach on health matters.  Masks should never be imposed under threat of financial penalty, job loss, or even jail, even assuming, generously, that the things work against a particle that can only be seen with an electron-microscope.

Mandatory Covid Vaccination

Ten months ago, Civil Liberties Australia issued a mealy-mouthed statement that, whilst “in general” Covid vaccination should not be mandatory, “if governments or businesses seek to make vaccination a compulsory requirement to access benefits, services, places of education or specific jobs, it must be rationally based”.  So, CLA is fine with the concept of compulsory vaccination, on the proviso that it is ‘rational’.  They conveniently leave the definition of ‘rational’ up in the air so any passing politician can simply say that any abrogation of freedoms re vaccination is entirely justified by the declaration of a public health crisis where, we are gravely told, people will die in their droves unless we curtail liberty to ‘stop the spread’.  As Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, put it during a radio interview: “It’s got nothing to do with ideology, and these issues around liberty and so on. We all believe in freedom, but we also believe in people being healthy”.

CLA agrees with their erstwhile Prime Ministerial foe.  They believe that it is ‘rational’, for example, that, “for good community health reasons”, all “health workers, hospital workers, aged care workers and prison guards” should be compulsorily vaccinated (or lose their job).  CLA falsely assumes that the Covid ‘vaccines’ work, despite much evidence to the contrary showing that double-jabbed workers can still infect their institutionalised charges thus making mandatory vaccination pointless on health grounds, whilst also exposing any injected workers to unnecessary risks from the experimental jabs.

The NSW CCL also backs No-Jab-No-Job policies for broader sections of the workforce.  “We support the right to a safe workplace”, they say, trotting out the ‘safety’ incantation, too often repeated unthinkingly by the trade union leadership, that has so wreaked so much damage on Australia, including on civil liberties.

Covid Vaccines – not just another vaccine

Covid vaccination is often presented, including by civil liberties groups, as simply a continuation of the socially desirable practice of immunisation against childhood diseases, a practice which is, in Australia, backed by coercive financial penalties and denial of services.  The childhood vaccines have a deservedly positive reputation because they provide lifetime, sterilising immunity against truly terrible diseases (smallpox, for example, had a 30% fatality rate; polio was crippling), they use traditional techniques (injecting a non-dangerous, dead/weakened virus to pump-prime immunity) and they have been exhaustively vetted for safety.

The childhood disease vaccines have a well-earnt ‘social license’ but the water has been muddied somewhat in Australia by coercive No-Jab-No-Pay and No-Jab-No-Play policies.  Back in 2015, the Commonwealth government (under former Liberal [i.e. conservative] Prime Minister, Tony Abbott), introduced a No-Jab-No-Pay policy under which families who have not taken up all the recommended childhood immunisations receive neither the Commonwealth welfare benefit for families with children nor child care subsidies.  Most state governments have since gone further with ‘No Jab No Play’ policies banning unvaccinated children from attending childcare and pre-school services.

Have these Commonwealth and state policies half a decade ago inadvertently set a precedent for the state to financially penalise or deny services to those who decline the Covid vaccines in 2021, thus coercing the recalcitrants into de facto compulsory Covid vaccination (noting that the current, rabid Covid-jabber, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was the relevant Social Services minister at the time of No-Jab-No-Pay in 2015)?  Will Covid vaxx coercion now include, for example, forcing unvaxxed children to wear masks all day, or be segregated, unless they get the Covid jab?

In 2015, some saw the coercive childhood vaccination policies as unacceptable infringements of civil liberties.  The Royal Australasian College of Physicians (the professional medical body for specialists) and the Australian Medical Association, (the doctors’ union), for example, both gave the 2015 childhood vaccine policies the civil liberties thumbs-down.  Liberty Victoria also had its mojo working back then, noting that “there is something deeply unpalatable in using compulsion, whether direct or indirect, to force parents to subject their children to preventative medical interventions when they believe such interventions may be harmful to their children. It is certainly not an approach favoured by medical ethics”.  No one was prepared to die in a ditch over it, however, and this may have since made it easier for mandatory Covid vaccination to go unchallenged by the former critics of coerced vaccination.

Covid Vaccine Passports

Covid Vaccine Passports for access to venues and much of social life are doing the heavy lifting against the vaccine recalcitrants in order to increase jab take-up to meet the political, not public health, imperative of using mass Covid vaccination as the exit ramp from the lockdown carousel without the authors and enablers of disastrous lockdowns having to own up to their Original lockdown Sin.

Australia’s civil liberty groups have, disgracefully, embraced the ensuing discriminatory medical apartheid.  The CLA, for example, is supportive of denying the unvaxxed certain freedoms such as “not being permitted to attend packed football matches or netball games” or banning them from participation in other ‘discretionary’ activities such as entertainment and travel.

The NSW CCL is also on board with Vaccine Passport discrimination by arguing that if, say, a restaurant is open only to the vaccinated, whilst this might be discrimination, it is not “unreasonable discrimination”.  The analogy they use in support is that, just as denying unlicensed drivers the right to use the roads to thus avoid the “terrible impact” they would have on licensed road users by causing accidents, those who choose not to get their Covid vaccine ‘license’ must be prevented from mingling with the vaxxed whom they would otherwise kill (despite the protection of their wonderful vaccine) by sharing a common space.  Bob Carr, the former Australian Foreign Minister who roamed the globe berating international human rights felons, has recently joined in with his wisdom - “a pig-headed view that one has the perfect right to be unvaccinated without medical justification is a violation (potentially fatal) of the rights of others to life and health. This should be enforced as we enforce smoke-free work environments or not driving while drunk”.

Such comparisons from the civil liberties spruikers and putative champions of human rights do not hold, however.  Drivers who have not passed their test or who get behind the wheel drunk, or smokers transmitting toxic carcinogens to fellow workers, do present a real risk to others but a person unvaxxed against Covid presents no more of a public health risk to others because the experimental Covid therapies are not sterilising vaccines and prevent neither infection in, nor transmission by, the vaxxed.  The central conceptual flaw of the Covid Vaccine Passport is that, if the Covid vaccines work, then a Vaccine Passport is unnecessary because the vaxxed are immune, and, if the vaccines don’t work, then a Vaccine Passport is pointless because no one is immune – or, as the sceptical might put the absurdity of the Covid passport idea, ‘Covid vaccine mandates are necessary because the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that didn't protect the protected’.  And, of course, naturally acquired immunity through infection, doesn’t count at all to the defenders of the Covid Vaccine Passport nonsense.

More broadly, the NSW CCL sees Covid Vaccine Passport coercion as the only way to “return to the full realisation of rights and freedoms” of the Before Times.  Mass Covid vaccination may be the only tool in the toolkit available to the political class but that doesn’t make it right, nor the only course of action.  How about admitting that lockdown was a disastrously wrongheaded, unnecessary experiment, which could be ended by ‘fessing up to a gross mistake and simply reversing policy.  Returning the freedoms stolen from us in a failed quest to control the virus would take humility and the admission of error (so don’t expect our politicians to warm to it) but civil liberties organisations have a duty to advocate for an immediate restoration of civil liberties not contingent on ‘vaccination’ up-take, rather than compounding the problem by supporting a further civil-liberties-negating policy of a Covid Vaccine Passport.

The NSW CCL also argues that, whilst vaccine passports may be distasteful, they are, nevertheless, justified providing that the discrimination they enforce is “temporary and proportionate”.  I would have thought that, after twenty months of ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, and after the rolling extension of ‘temporary’ authoritarian executive powers under perpetually renewed states of emergency, that this argument represents a triumph of hope over experience, and a classic example of the slippery slope of ‘temporary and proportionate’ in relation to fundamental freedoms.

The NSW CCL’s endorsement of Vaccine Passports is an unfortunate example of international groupthink, the ideological affliction which has taken hold of much of the world during Covid.  When you have run out of your own (magical thinking) ideas on controlling the virus but think you need to be seen to be Doing Something then 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' is all you've got.  Other countries have the Passports, including China, says the NSW CCL.  That other countries have gone nuts with the things is no reason why we should do likewise, of course, particularly when the passports were pioneered by a neo-Stalinist dictatorship which would have any of its domestic civil liberties activists banged up in no time flat.

The American Civil Liberties Union goes one further than its Australian clones by proposing that Covid Vaccine Passports actually advance civil liberties because, whilst we all have “the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions … these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others” by declining a vaccine.  So vaccine coercion is permissible for “devastating diseases like Covid”, the ACLU argues.  Would this be the disease that has an overall survival rate of a flu-like 99.85% (for the original Alpha strain, which is now up to 99.904% for the Delta variant) and which, unlike the flu, leaves the kids entirely alone and which is a nothingburger, mortality-wise, for all but the most highly vulnerable, immuno-compromised, multiple comorbidity, institutionalised aged persons who could, even so, be safely and effectively treated with off-patent pharmaceuticals such as ivermectin were these cheap drugs not banned by regulatory agencies in hock to their Big Pharma patrons and whose availability would undermine the legitimacy of any declaration of a pandemic (as used to be the case before the WHO got with the Big Pharma program).

And, even if a virus had a vastly more lethal profile, would compulsory vaccination still cross an ethical line?  No vaccine is 100% safe, certainly not the Covid ‘vaccines’ which carry a significant mortality (or severe adverse reaction) risk, so any policy for coerced Covid vaccination will inevitably kill or seriously harm some who face no threat from the virus.  Civil libertarians can be agnostic about the Covid vaccines’ efficacy but they can not be agnostic about their risk. ‘Where there is risk there must be choice’ is not just a catchy slogan for a protest placard - it is a nutshell’s worth of guiding principle on unethical compulsory vaccination but the civil liberties pretenders can’t seem to get their tongues around the phrase.

Not that long ago, in 2008, the ACLU in America was defending civil liberties in response to the avian bird flu pandemic, which (like Covid) produced alarmist modelling and hysterical forecasts of millions of deaths.  Back then, the ACLU published a report which denounced as both unnecessary, and dangerous, state coercion in the name of public health.  With ironic prescience, they wrote, then, that “too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have encouraged abuses of state power. Atrocities, large and small, have been committed in the name of protecting the public’s health”.  Coercion and mandates are never preferable to persuasion and voluntary compliance, they said then.  Wise words – but soooo pre-Covid.  And soooo ‘Old Left’, unlike the new, Covid-deranged Left.

Why have so many civil liberties organisations failed?

Australia’s civil liberties incumbents will not be coming to our rescue.  Indeed, they are to be counted amongst our gaolers – nicer gaolers to be sure, allowing us an extra hour in the exercise yard, perhaps, or more ‘privileges’ always contingent on  continued good behaviour and more supine deference to authority – but gaolers, none the less.

So, why have they failed so badly in their one job to protect civil liberties?  Civil liberties has historically been primarily a left wing concern because it has been the left and the trade unions, as the political and industrial expression of the interests of the working class, which have been denied their freedoms at the hands of an undemocratic capitalist state acting on behalf of corporate interests.  No one but the left was going to come to the civil liberties defence of the working class during the long history of Red Scares and Anti-Communist witch-hunts, imperialist war crusades and anti-union drives, but with the transformation of the contemporary left from a workers’ movement with a class focus to an identity-politics clearinghouse, class as an organising axis has been sidelined.

A working class left would have had no truck with the sacrifice of jobs during lengthy lockdowns, or the 25% wage cuts effected through furlough, or forced medical experimentation on workers in order to keep their jobs, or the wearing of useless, harmful face-coverings as a condition of employment.  A class-based left which once took seriously workplace health and safety issues (from asbestosis and silicosis, from mine explosions to construction site safety, from repetitive strain injury in the office to family-friendly working hours) would not have fallen for the concocted workplace health risk from a virus which leaves working age people effectively unscathed.

Instead, the contemporary left’s political crush on masks, lockdowns and compulsory vaccination, none of which work against Covid is all about the dramatic, but entirely useless (and damaging), political theatre of saving lives.  It has, as a consequence, resulted in the trashing of civil liberties –for workers and their organisational power, for their communities and their cultural recreations.  Like the broader left, Australia’s, and most of the world’s, prominent civil liberties organisations have become unmoored from the working class and they have been nigh on hopeless during this unprecedented time of civil liberties abuses because they have subordinated real human rights to an abstract and misconceived (‘if it saves just one life’) ‘safety’. 

It is not just the leftwing civil liberties sector that has failed miserably during the time of Covid, however.  An alarmingly large percentage of the population would seemingly trade their freedom and liberties for a 0.015% increase in perceived safety.  Thus has the loss of our civil liberties been swift, enduring and astonishingly unresisted at both elite and popular levels.  Traditional civil liberties’ norms, so often taken for granted, have been exposed by the lockdown crisis and ensuing medical tyranny as really quite fragile, and supremely vulnerable to a Great Fear.

The virus-demented political, medical, academic, scientific and media classes have all gone gaga over Covid and most civil liberties groups have now joined their ranks, with, at best, apologetic, shoulder-shrugging rationalisations that proportionate and temporary measures are acceptable (it’s only ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, it’s only a mask, it’s only a QR-Code app, it’s only an injection, it’s only a temporary suspension of traditional rights).  As the Covid bonfire of civil liberties rages in Australia, the civil liberties groups are, through their support for lockdown and its attendant horrors of mask mandates and vaxx passports, stoking the flames rather than helping to put them out.