Australia’s Prime Minister is known for emoting and for pursuing nothingburger public policy issues (the Voice, the republic, climate emergencies, etc). They are issues aptly described as ‘solutions in search of problems’ – while ignoring our real national problems. When it comes to real problems, where to start? It would require a book, not an article.
But Anthony Albanese did promise a serious inquiry into Australia’s Covid response. Whatever happened to that inquiry? Sky News Australia reports:
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised a royal commission-style inquiry into Australia’s response to COVID-19 – yet it was ‘nowhere to be seen’ in the recent budget, according to Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell.
‘Now I understand there was an informal discussion between premiers last year when it was roundly decided that there were issues in the health system arising out of the pandemic that needed to be addressed first before any pandemic inquiry,’ Mr Clennell said.
‘It’s also been put to me that two premiers who might not be that enthusiastic about a royal commission at the moment were Annastacia Palaszczuk and Daniel Andrews.’
In an era of bungling and clueless incompetence from 2020-23, perhaps the worst thing to have happened is the apparent decision not to investigate the cesspit of government and corporate malfeasance.
Maybe the clue to the ‘nothing to see here’ approach of the Albanese regime is in the final paragraph of the quote from Sky News Australia. An inquiry would be inconvenient for the Labor premiers of Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The federal government doesn’t have anything to personally fear, as Labor spent the pandemic in opposition.
Many of our publicly-funded Covid goons have departed the scene. Sadly, none of them have so far faced the ire of a forensic Royal Commission – these include former Premiers Berejiklian, Perrottet, Gunner, Marshall, and that bloke in Tasmania. Chief among those who are unlikely to face scrutiny is Scott Morrison.
An entire generation of non-leaders of the political class allowed themselves to be manoeuvred into one of the most cruel and disastrous decisions in our history. Anyone not truly disgusted by all of this is missing something deep in his or her soul and mind. Too many people are invested in keeping the Covid madness quiet. The cult. The hysteria. The policy decisions that led to unnecessarily harms against healthy citizens. Even the brutal displays of excessive force used by police. 2023 is the Year of Nothing to See Here.
If any country needed to inquire into its Covid response, it is Australia. With North Korea and Cuba, we were the only nation to stop citizens from leaving. Foreign nations were left shaking their heads over our submission to Covid totalitarianism. Americans and Brits just didn’t understand it. Australia was unique in creating a formal alternate governmental process (called the National Cabinet) that replaced parliaments and accountable decision-making. We had the army in the streets. We had military police following the innocent. We had curfews and house arrest. We had internal border closures.
We also had very few deaths at the height of Covid in 2020-21. It remained that way until the vaccine mandates and brutal vaccine marketing arrived in late 2021. After 2021, people started dying in more serious numbers! It is one of history’s starker correlations. Unexplained deaths despite mass vaccination (we ask)? Huge spikes in excess deaths? No, still nothing to see here.
If for no other reason, we need a Royal Commission just to remind ourselves of all the madness that took place. It was a fit of madness that cost people their lives, jobs, careers, businesses, goodbyes to loved ones, and friendships. Oh yes, it was a divisive time. A mere flu-like virus was able to render families and friendships permanently split in ways that even climate change, same-sex marriage, the Voice, or Brexit couldn’t. Yes, many do want to punish people and only consider forgiveness after an admission of criminal culpability. But those given to ponder these things also want all the stages and cases of the insanity recorded so as to be remembered. Remembered with clear minds the next time the fascist ideas come for us.
As Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times sums it up neatly: ‘…it seems they’re hoping the public simply forgets what actually took place.’
You might say that the political class is simply hoping to ride the (late American economist) Anthony Downs’ ‘issue attention cycle’ – where even the most important political issues have a limited shelf life, and eventually just go away.
The other great line of the Covid class, from the mouth of Anthony Fauci, is:
‘Nothing was done perfectly.’
Yes, he really wrote that, in a New York Times puff piece. This is the ‘we did our best’ excuse. ‘If only we knew then…’ Do we really want to let our political leaders get away with this tosh? I suspect this type of thinking is alive and well among the Australian political establishment.
One of the greatest symptoms of ‘forgetting’ (and the new Australian insouciance) has been noted by Jeffrey Tucker:
‘We are back to pretending that the people and not the Faucis of the world are in charge.’
The people are far less in charge now than we were three years ago. And we weren’t remotely in charge then. Assuming that the Covid totalitarian moment was just another event, and has now passed into history, would be a fatal error. Remember that history rhymes, even if it doesn’t repeat (as Mark Twain suggested).
Then there is Covid fatigue militating against popular resistance. Jeffrey Tucker again:
‘…people are tired and demoralised and more than ready for normal life again. But we cannot simply wish away the ugly truths all around us.’
Things are no better stateside. As Tucker notes:
‘Congress holds hearings on the pandemic response and that’s great. But the mass media does not cover them. A brutalised population does not want to revisit the trauma. There has been and will likely not be any real accountability much less a Nuremberg 2.0.’
Does anyone think that, were an inquiry to be held here, the media would report on it fairly? It’s unlikely.
Which questions should most occupy the minds of some future inquiry? And what about suitable punishments to ensure accountability? As the Brownstone Institute states:
These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history. They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalise the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties, and truth.
…The people who implemented this Hell remain in power, and they appear unremorseful.
It is so important to get the history correct. In one place. On the official record. But a Royal Commission might also shed light on meta-issues, so as to begin to reverse course and commence the long and winding road back to sane, non-corrupt governance. With an eye to the future. Five issues on my list are as follows:
- The worship of scientism;
- The reflexive urge to censor dissidents and stifle debate;
- Executive government creep, in secrecy;
- The treason of the medicos;
- How Covid became a Woke issue.
This is only a start.
With apologies to all those who are currently focusing with all their might on the Voice, the republic, the prospect of mass immigration, and all of the other important-in-normal-times issues that are dangerous but not game-ending, I would say, there is another elephant in the room here.
We simply cannot allow the political class to re-write the history of Covid.
They took almost everything we had.
