No plan for the state of chaos
AT different times in this pandemic, as Australians, all of us have signed away our freedom on the promise that government would protect our health and preserve our prosperity.
In Victoria, especially, people have been asked to accept a degree of control that’s totally unprecedented — supposedly for six weeks but with no reassurance that it would not be indefinite.
Unless you’re employed in food, health or utilities, almost no one in Victoria is working normally.
Most Melburnians can only leave home, legally, for one hour of exercise and a solo trip to the supermarket (all within 5km) and are locked up at night.
There have never been general curfews in Australia. Never.
The nearest thing was probably the blackouts in coastal towns during World War II.
Curfews happen in places under martial law or enemy occupation.
Yet that’s the fate of 5.5 million Melburnians.
There’s even talk of rationing — again, totally unknown, except in wartime or during strikes in specific industries — all because workers in supply chain jobs, such as distribution centres, are being kept at home.
I can’t go to work at Sky without carrying papers to prove I am a “permitted worker” — shades of occupied Europe or the Soviet bloc — otherwise it’s a heavy fine.
The police and military have been patrolling the park near my home, presumably to detain curfew breakers and to fine people who spend too much time exercising or travel too far to do it or, heaven forbid, sit down on a park bench.
All this because less than two years ago, a majority of Victorians bought the premier’s well-rehearsed media spin and elected the most incompetent government in Australian history.
I can’t fathom how anyone can still defend him, but given he’s assiduously delivered the hard left’s agenda, there’s a handful of the usual suspects trying to desperately rally support around a hashtag #Istandwithdan.
Well here’s mine #where’sthebloodyplandan?
For months, our liberties, jobs and general wellbeing have all been steadily eroded by a premier who is treating democracy, and accountability to the people, as an optional extra to be dispensed with whenever he deems it necessary.
The state parliament has been shutdown, media conferences are long on spin but short on candour and, while there’s an update on the daily tally of new infections, deaths and hospitalisations, none of the “expert advice” supposedly driving decision-making is shared.
Disease specialists have gone public to demand greater transparency, but they’ve been rejected too; as have calls for the release of genomic modelling that will tell us exactly how much of this outbreak is linked to failed hotel quarantining.
Last Wednesday, even the judge heading up the toothless inquiry into the quarantine debacle said there’s no legal reason why the premier or ministers cannot answer questions on the issue.
Her intervention didn’t change anything — the inquiry still doesn’t have the power to compel witnesses and documents, and its reporting date has been pushed out from September, to year’s end.
Thank god, some in the local media subjected the premier to tougher questioning last week, because that’s the only accountability that the Victorian government faces.
We also saw some Victorian-based federal MPs finally speak up too, after months of being told they couldn’t criticise Andrews, given the whole facade of National Cabinet unity.
Never before have Victorians ceded so much power to government and never before has a government been less worthy.
We need our parliaments to sit so there’s at least some check on how these powers are used because the prerequisite to good government has always been a strong opposition.
Even during the blitz, Winston Churchill insisted parliament sit.
Here, too, wars never stopped our elected leaders being accountable, yet, last week, the Victorian government tried to claim parliament was “not an essential service”.
So, Dan Murphy’s can stay open, but not the people’s house?
Things are really crook in Victoria and I’m not talking about the virus.