Welcome to the 'Just A Little Bit Pregnant' School of Lockdown

The 'Fault Lines' review of Australia's response to Covid

In Australia, the Covid reviews have now started coming in and first cab off the ranks is an entry (FAULT LINES: An independent review into Australia’s response to COVID-19) from an impeccably worthy team headed by Peter Shergold (Chancellor of Western Sydney University and former big cheese of the Prime Minister’s Department) and commissioned and funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

The report declares that the Covid policy response in Australia was “overreach” because the virus control policies were “ill-conceived”, the public health orders were “politically driven” and the lengthy lockdowns were “excessive” and “failed to protect the old, disregarded the young and abandoned some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities".

Pretty damning findings, at first blush, but before you throw your hat in the air in celebration, the report ultimately disappoints by being unable to fundamentally break from the official Covid Narrative (super-deadly virus demands extreme social isolation response) and instead opts for a ‘moderate’ course of ‘limited’ restrictions, a recipe predicated on the assumption, despite all subsequent evidence to the contrary, that lockdowns and other ‘social distancing’ policies really work at controlling a virus.  With more efficient implementation by a better set of Experts, and more ‘compassion’ in their execution, the Report argues, freedom-negating restrictions can still prevent a virus from becoming endemic.  The Covid vaccine is assumed to be the White Knight which ultimately comes to the rescue to seal the ‘zero endemicity’ deal.

Wiser now after the policy horrors of Covid, the Report advances the need for more “balance” in restriction measures by being more ‘targeted’ in demographic reach, more ‘limited’ in scope and more ‘temporary’ in duration.  For Covid, it says, lockdowns and border closures were a “blunt instrument” and should have “been used less” whilst schools should have been kept open “in the main”.  So, fewer is better when it comes to pandemic restrictions but fewer does not equal none.  Not everyone will ‘need’ to be lockdowned but some will.  Not every school will need to be shut but some will.

So, Fault Lines champions a kinder, gentler regime of restrictions based on fewer shutdowns of everything but more of the meaningless, misleading, useless and unnecessary measures such as small-scale lockdowns, more ‘case’-counting (the report is obsessed with the meaningless ‘case’ metric), more PCR testing and contact-tracing, continued quarantine of the asymptomatic/healthy who ‘test positive’ and all the rest of the frenetic cascade of increasingly preposterous Covid nonsense including masks which, it asserts, are a “preventative measure” to forestall lockdowns.

The Report team’s embrace of the wretched mask (which is sheer pandemic theatre and a key feature of the ‘public health’ illusion of control) whenever any sort of pandemic-scale virus looms is like a team of putative astrophysicists, with their big brains, sophisticated equipment and solemn ponderings over complex mathematical formulae, believing that yes, indeed, the moon is made of cheese.  If you want a litmus test for assessing the credibility of any report on anything to do with the virus and its policy response, then an uncritical view of The Mask is it.

‘Just a little bit pregnant’

All up, the report belongs to the school of thought that maintains that it is possible to get just a little bit pregnant and avoid the whole nine yards of the ordeal but just as the female reproductive state of being just a tiny bit pregnant is a biological impossibility, so, too, is the desire for just a little bit of moderate lockdown, restrictions and ‘social distancing’.

The logic that kept ratcheting up the restrictions under Covid will still prevail to prevent breaches in the new ‘zero endemicity’ containment ring constructed by the virus control technocrats (including the  crisis-junkies in ‘public health’ and the politicians ever fearful of a bad ‘let it rip’ headline, with Big Pharma cheering it all along from the corporate seats).  This ‘moderate’ approach however, can’t square the circle.  Start down the restriction road and there is no going back - ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ (try saying that phrase with a straight face ever again) seamlessly stretched into two years of on-again-off-again lockdowns with increasing stringency of enforcement.  Border closures lingered on interminably (only since July 2022 have the unjabbed been allowed to enter Australia).  Mask ‘advisories’ turned into fineable mandates in the blink of an eye.  Vaxx passports and mandates were as sure as eggs once the ‘miracle’ goo was in stock.

Much of the Covid commentariat has swooned over the report (the AFR and The Australian both gave it rave reviews) whilst the Covid-Narrative-compliant The Conversation gave it a hearty thumbs-up) because it allows them, now, only after the bullets have stopped flying in the Covid Wars, to pretend to be radical critics of Australia’s authoritarian and draconian Covid regimes without having to question its foundations which they so willingly supported at the time or were discomfited by but uselessly silent about at the time when it really mattered.

This sort of post-hoc lockdown revisionism is going to become increasingly common as future reviews (including the mooted Royal Commission if it is suitably wing-clipped) take the same path of ‘allowable’ criticism of Covid ‘excesses’ at a safe distance in time, whilst maintaining support for the pandemic response assumptions underlying Covid, providing it is all ‘done right’ next time.

The only outlier to this likely trend, so far, is WA Labor Premier, Mark McGgowan, the Infallible One, who in announcing an ‘independent’ view to be commissioned by his government, has already given it its running orders – “because we were highly cautious and highly proactive in implementing measures that were pretty tough and strong with a degree of urgency and that worked so I probably wouldn't do anything different".  Fantasyland stuff but not in the cute Disneyesque sense of the term.  “I'm not interested in a witch hunt", he said.  I bet he’s not – this is the state premier who called a string of snap lockdowns, closed all WA’s borders for fully two years, had strict testing and isolation requirements and who forced at least 75% of WA’s workforce to bow down to a Covid jab mandate in order to keep their jobs.  No blame here in WA.  Not even for any ‘overreach’.

For the main part, however, the ‘moderate’ restrictionists, the critics of ‘overreach’ who admit we may have gone a little overboard on the whole lockdown and mandate thing, will hold sway, not wanting to be associated with the restriction fanatics because of the undeniable destruction of lives and well-being their regimes imposed.

Distractions

Part of the job description of being a ‘moderate’ lockdown/test/mask extremist is to find distractions from the main game that it was the lockdown/test/mask mantra that was the problem in the first place.  So, the Report spends an inordinate amount of time on how “the burden [of the official response to Covid] was not shared equally”.  Specifically, they mean that not all socio-economic groups shared equally in the government largesse that kept most of the (‘non-essential’) workforce idling at home.  There is much tugging at the woke heartstrings by moaning about how such favoured identity groups as temporary migrants, international students, refugees and “multicultural communities” “bore the brunt” of the Covid lockdown response by being excluded from state economic support (all the Foundations sponsoring the Report are terribly woke outfits).

These are the ‘fault lines’ of inequity that concern the Report, the implication being that the lockdown policy response would have passed muster if everyone suffered the same.  All this, however, misses the point that lockdown was neither needed, affordable, safe nor or effective.  A focus on the inequity of state-funded furlough distracts from the giant chasm that was opened up by the official Covid response, namely how freedom (personal, civil and economic) was revoked at the drop of an unelected health bureaucrat’s hat.

Missing the mark

The Report also misses the mark by failing to understand that what it calls the occasional excesses of “government regulations and their enforcement [which] went beyond what was required to control the spread of the virus” were not just reprehensible for the lack of “compassion built into their implementation” but that none of the official response to Covid was necessary or ethical.

The Report also remains enamoured of politicians’ reliance on Experts (when this is what got us into the mess in the first place) and that all we need is to improve the quality of Expert-led advice - "Australia should establish a panel of multidisciplinary experts, from the broadest range of health, economic, social and cultural fields” rather than just public health obsessives whose narrow, specialist vision failed to take account of the full-range of effects of flicking society’s off-switch.

There is, however, no guarantee that a more diverse cast of Experts from different fields would count for much with a scary death-ticker rotating fictionally but ominously in the background.  No class of expert came out of the Covid panic with any credit.  At the height of the 2020 mania, for example, a survey by the Economic Society of Australia  found that only one of Australia’s top fifty economists (academic, government and private) strongly supported re-opening Australia in May 2020 by ending lockdowns and ‘social distancing’.  Three-quarters of them ‘strongly supported’ keeping Australia locked down and keeping national and state borders padlocked on cost-benefit grounds.  With Experts like this on any expanded advisory panel, draconian policy would not be unduly challenged.  What is missing from the advisory ranks are genuine experts in scepticism but they’re not the kind of Experts that governments like all that much.

Other notable lacunae in the report includes its fealty to the WHO (an institution owned by Big Pharma and controlled by lockdown-nutty China).  The Report undertakes no meaningful inquisition of the wanton borrowing and money-printing by governments that fuelled the inflation that is a mighty fault line down which ordinary Australians have now fallen.  There is not a single word about what individuals can do to boost their natural immune system (eat less, eat better, move more) as a prophylactic response to viruses.

The Big Lacunae (aka the Big Lie)

But the biggest oversight, a bridge too far for the ‘respectable’ critics of Covid, is the Covid vaxx.  The Covid ‘vaccines’ are taken as an unquestioned good and the only criticism of the vaccines is confined to problems with their rollout and communication.  Authoritarian (and useless) vaccine mandates and passports go unmentioned.  The Report is silent on the effect of the novel vaccines – an excess total death rate in Australia (17% above normal for 2021-22) which it asserts is all down to Covid and not the vaxx, and, the ‘logic’ goes, as there is no vaxx problem per se to address, the assumption is that there can be no need for any apology, any compensation, any justice at all for the victims of vaxx injuries or for those who declined the vaxx and were sacked or for those who were coerced or blackmailed to take the shots.

Fault Lines is a little behind their master’s voice here, however, because the new Albanese Labor government has, very quietly, squirreled away $76.9 million compensation in its first budget in fiscal anticipation of (part of) the deluge of Covid vaxx harm they see coming down the pipeline in 2022-23 (it would be much more but for the scheme’s bureaucratic cumbersomeness and very strict eligibility criteria for only a select number of side effects such as myocarditis - only a pathetic 2% of claims have so far made it over all the compensation hurdles).

Despite being a little behind the government on this matter, however, the Report generally adheres quite closely to the party line on Covid with its market differentiation taking the form of being better, more ‘restrained’ managers of the same essential policy response that went off the rails during the height of the panic (sorry, ‘pandemic’).

‘Independent’, my foot

Key to the Report’s marketing strategy is touting its ‘independent’ credentials but it remains tied, by personnel and basic conceptual assumptions, to the policy framework that misinformed the entire official response to Covid.  The ‘independent’ review team consist of philanthropic charities which all come from the Big End of Town - the Paul Ramsay Foundation is Australia’s biggest charity (making its dosh from its shareholding in the private health company, Ramsay Health Care); the Minderoo Foundation is one of mining magnate, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s, pet ‘progressive’ projects; the John and Myriam Wylie Foundation is the child of investment bankers; Jillian Broadbent is in the same wealthy (banking fortune) boat; Isobel Marshall is a South Australian ‘social entrepreneur’, a former Young Australian of the Year and is on the state Premier’s Council for Women (she is also a medical student, so her Covid illiteracy is not at all surprising because the medical class of 2020-21-22 has stuffed up badly on all things Covid).

They are all well-connected to governing and institutional circles - their ideological and political bloodline is impeccably orthodox.  Clearly, these are the right sort of people to be running Covid apologetics because Covid dissidents don’t move in such exalted social circles.  The report also boasts of how widely it consulted (Over 200 consultations!  Over 160 submissions!) but it shows no evidence of consulting the Covid ‘deplorables’ in the freedom movement against arbitrary, futile lockdowns and restrictions.  Only ’Covid Safe’ views were obviously canvassed. 

Fault Line’s faux ‘independence’ from the prevailing Covid orthodoxy of government/medical/media authorities results in a benign report premised along the lines that ‘mistakes were made’ but only because there was a “fog of uncertainty” at the start of the ‘pandemic’ and that governments and their (hand-picked) experts had no choice but to act in a ‘cautious’, ‘proactive’ and ‘prudent’ way because viral doom would otherwise have been just around the corner.  I’m sorry, but shutting down society and robbing everyone of their rights and freedoms is not cautious, proactive or prudent – it is reckless, unjustified and dangerous.

There was never any ‘fog’.  We knew, as early as March 2020 that the virus was no big deal for the vast majority of people.  Back then the unplanned real-life laboratory experiment of a Covid outbreak onboard the Diamond Princess showed that, even for the mostly elderly, at-risk passengers, there was a high degree of pre-existing cross-reactive natural immunity, that it was mild for those that did get it, and that the seven deaths recorded were most likely due to the use of deadly ventilators in hospital ICUs.

We (including even the WHO) knew, long before that, that the loony Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (including lockdowns) were ridiculous pandemic theatre and that the mooted Covid vaccines were never going to miraculously work, after forty failed years of trying against any coronavirus (including the common cold) and would only cause immense harm.  We knew that any set of terrifying numbers of mass Covid carnage produced by Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson, ‘Expert Zero’ who sent the rest of the world’s Experts into a tailspin of panic and hysteria, should have been immediately invalidated by his long, unblemished record of wild predictions of viral Armageddon that spectacularly failed to eventuate.

Don’t blame us

Yet, because the threat we faced was ‘immense’, the Report asserts, blame should not be levelled at anyone because all the architects of the restriction policies acted from only the best motives, it was better to be ‘safe than sorry’, better to overreact than to underreact and all the rest of the paltry excuses for their wild policies that caused so much destruction and did absolutely no good at all.

Bucketloads if blame, however, are due.  The Covid fanatics stole our freedom, our rights, our material wellbeing, our children’s education, our serenity, our way of life – and all for nothing.  ‘Overreach’ doesn’t cut it.  Criticising a policy suite for ‘overreach’ implies that some sort of government reach (i.e. compulsion for people to behave in dictated ways) is acceptable.  It isn’t.  Government should only provide accurate information, and should not censor contrary information and dissenting opinions.  Government should let adults assess and manage their own health risks.  Governments should keep out of our lives.

We are owed an apology for the Covid restrictionists’ infantile yet authoritarian and damaging intervention in the futile quest to control a respiratory virus.  Who knows, perhaps an apology could come in handy when they seek mitigation for their sentence after the long arc of justice comes for them for criminal negligence.

Fault Lines, with its ‘just a little bit pregnant’ fantasy of limited, targeted and temporary lockdowns and restrictions, is a long way short of any proper apology.  It’s highly circumscribed criticisms of ‘overreach’ are just baby steps but we don’t want toddlers, forever falling over and falling short, to be in charge of reviewing the greatest public policy disaster of recent generations.