Australian Authoritarianism Is Coming – Can Civil Society Pause to Reflect?
I came from the dream-time, from the dusty red-soil plains, I am the ancient heart, the keeper of the flame…We are one, but we are many, and from all the lands on earth we come, we'll share a dream and sing with one voice, I am, you are, we are Australian.
― Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
The pandemic has eroded at everyone’s resilience and resulted in waves of free-flowing anxiety washing over societies. It has chipped away at community ties and resulted in strengthening divisions as well as creating some new ones. Psychologists have identified myriad cognitive biases that affect our perceptions and judgments, but the ones that prevail are those that support perceptual distortions of reality which enable our survival, especially in times when the brain and body are in ‘fight or flight’ as societies have been since the onset of this public health crisis. Historically, this has been any bias which reduced contentious, dysfunctional chaos, and typically therefore encouraged tribalism.
We have the mantra “we’re all in this together.” There is social communion around solving for the pandemic and ending our collective anxiety through joint efforts of obeying restrictions and mandates. Conversely, and axiomatically, social exclusion and dehumanisation of anyone who disagrees with institutional responses to the pandemic has become normalised. How we have responded to the pandemic prevention and control measures has been – erroneously – assumed to align with our political symmetries, but tribalism behaviour itself is a problem throughout the political spectrum. It’s a human problem, not a political one.
We are searching for our tribe, our tribe to survive this crisis with. The people we relate to, who have similar worldviews and similar values. Dear reader, I also know that you have suffered. I know this because everyone has suffered. You may have lost someone to the disease, you have had your life upended through the restrictions, and you have suffered. You may have also suppressed that suffering, because you want to push aside any notions of the self in service of protecting the vulnerable. But what if our quiet obeisance to the demands of bureaucracy in service of ‘doing what is right’ is creating a greater threat than we have ever faced before?
Perhaps we are beginning to allow a biosecurity regime to use a permanent state of crisis management as a weapon against us. Perhaps we are acquiescing to a reconfiguration of our basic, non-derogable, absolute, inalienable and intrinsic human rights into privileges and rewards, just as quickly taken away as returned to us on a whim. This crisis continues to divide us, in the name of uniting us - we “stay apart to stay together” and are told it is the dissenters who are “undoing all our hard work”. Up is down and down is up. This crisis is testing our presumptions about how to apply abstractions of human rights. It is testing our belief in contextualised, community-centric and respectful policy and programming. It is testing our presuppositions of allowable personal sacrifice in the name of the community. It is testing our commitment to the relational, testing the nature of our relationship to another person, in our ability to understand and trust in another. And it is obfuscating our ability to trust our intuition to separate truth from lies.
Ultimately, we need durable solutions and protocols for prevention and treatment, and we need to apply those solutions equitably. Yet I contend that focused and tailored prevention efforts have been ignored in favour of repressive, universal mandates. This nuanced analysis appears to be missing from the conversation. It is the very fluid, dynamic and evolving nature of the efficacy and safety data of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions that I call attention to, rather than perfunctory conclusions about either. There is so much data, so much doubt on the validity of multiple avenues and points of (dis/mis/valid) information, that a contention can be made in any direction and for any position. In this chaos, I keep coming back to this question – can’t we indeed ‘do the right thing’ in the right way? I am also asking for a reinvigoration of debate, discussion and respectful discourse, including with civil society’s voice front and centre to remind our elected representatives to approach all decisions through a rights-based framework.
Australians are quietly beginning to voice their concerns, including those who arrived here from repressive dictatorships, but international relief and development agencies who are well versed in human rights law and principles have been notably absent from the conversation. Perhaps it is because we assume our responsibility is to monitor oppression abroad, but we haven’t yet conceptualised our role in monitoring it at home. Perhaps the reason lies in the struggle to balance group authority/uniformity and individual autonomy/diversity which human rights defenders today appear to grapple with most intensely, in a world characterised by increasing inequality and disparity of all kinds – race, gender and class.
Allowing rational and sensible discussion on the cost-benefit ratio analysis of how the Australian government is responding to this pandemic is necessary to protect children’s rights, as well as the rights of the general public. Currently, this discussion cannot be had as Australia is operating under an atmosphere which considers debate an act of misinformation spreading and non-compliance with public health orders punishable through the denial of the rights to go about your everyday life, including earning a living or even to leave the country without permission. The pandemic is a rapidly evolving situation, but we are moving ahead with mandates which will have an irreversible effect on our bodies as well as on our culture and human rights frameworks. The public has ample justification and evidence, therefore, to request an open and frank reassessment of the methodology underpinning state and territory policies. This is further augmented by the wealth of evidence from international counterparts which can be used to better understand the risks and benefits of various policy measures.
For a community that is deeply steeped in the value of radical inclusion, there is a duty to protect those now being excluded legally, culturally and structurally from society. Perhaps it makes some uncomfortable, as we are lost in a mass psychosis that seeks desperately to find a way out of our predicament. This aggression may be misdirected at those who exercise their right to question the dominant narrative, and perhaps should be more aptly directed at figures of authority who are increasingly using and abusing their positions to tighten the noose around civil liberties in the name of public health. Have we capitulated to a maelstrom of cognitive dissonance? Over 700,000 Australians across major cities showed their discontent and concern peacefully at rallies on 20 November. Are they all right-wing extremists? As human rights defenders, we have a duty to amplify the voices of the censored and powerless. The antidote to impunity is accountability. But accountability can only be demanded if all voices have consequence.
Safety has become weaponised, conscientious thought has become outlawed, passionate debate and philosophical/empirical discussion is unsavoury, and we now have a new pandemic – one of unwavering compliance and limitless patience for government regulation. There is no singular, objective Truth. But there might be agreement that the search for truth (with a lowercase ‘t’), and the deontological process by which we reach a shared reality, should be held in the highest regard. It only takes 10 percent of the population to change the unshakable beliefs of the other 90 percent. Countless historical precedents illustrate that the majority is often not acting in the best interest of humanity, and it was the dissenting minority whose voice needed amplifying.
Is it time for us to consider whether the truth needs revisiting and whether this conversation needs our voice?
I do not pretend to know your journey and if whether like me, you have vacillated from grief to ebullience, from the numb to the numinous, from feeling helpless to sceptered. Many of the queries below may resonate with you, others less so because you have already encountered and dealt with them to your satisfaction. So let me be clear: what follows is not meant to offend or even to confront. It is meant to respectfully provoke and to cogitate with goodwill and open-hearted inquisitiveness. I would be lying if I said it is not intended to persuade. Thank you for taking the time to ponder along with me. I know this is long, please stay with me.
Have we displaced children’s fundamental rights with our fears, anxieties and neuroses?
We were experiencing multiple crises of preventable deaths at the scale of a pandemic, before Covid-19 emerged, including deaths of several million children of poor nutrition and conflict-induced famine each year. Civil society and public health advocates have tried, albeit with little success, to bring an end to this suffering, but the global will to reallocate resources and change behaviours which ultimately result in this tragedy has yet to materialise. I often wonder what level of indignation, coordination and determination would be required to – perhaps overnight – ensure almost no child died of hunger and malnutrition ever again, anywhere. I still don’t have the answer. Now, UNICEF confirms that mitigation policies arising from the coronavirus pandemic will push an additional 150 million children into multidimensional poverty, due to the deprivation of education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation or water.
All children face many direct and indirect long-term social and economic consequences from policies put in place to control the spread of disease. The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) response taught humanitarian organisations a number of lessons when it comes to protecting the fundamental rights of children during an epidemic or pandemic. These include that children’s access to education and healthcare should not be diminished due to the significant detrimental effects on their development. One stark example (out of many) comes from South Australia, where four newborns were denied life-saving care due to mobility restrictions. Young Victorians continue to express their concern that disruptions to their education and quality of education is their largest concern, and is having debilitating effects on their health. Many medical practitioners were not seeing patients, or triaging and delaying appointments, resulting in delayed diagnoses and exacerbated existing conditions. In Victoria, the mental health crisis has increased markedly, with a recent study finding attempted suicides among teenagers have risen 184% in recent months. The sustained developmental effects of isolation, separation, lockdowns and more on children is yet to be seen. A UNSW economist began with the assumption that lockdowns work, and found that the minimum cost per six-week lockdown is at least three times greater than the benefit in terms of the COVID-related welfare that the lockdown could potentially provide. She was promptly eviscerated for this contribution, as have many experts who provided counterfactuals, and a hallmark of authoritarian environments is the total suppression of dissent. The EVD response lessons learned also includes the recommendation that community-based responses “based on listening to people’s concerns, rather than telling them what they should or should not do, will save resources, save time and save lives,” which is a far more inclusive, contextualised and compassionate approach in glaring contrast to the top-down and militant mandates being enforced. Finally, a lesson learned included that children being forcibly separated from their families without parental consent, in the name of public health, violated their fundamental rights. Border closures resulted in over 650,000 separated families which has had an immeasurable deleterious and long-lasting effect on over 1.3 million Australian children.
Here I could quote the statistics on how the disease of Covid-19 has affected children, for a balanced review of risk. But I will not condescend to your intellect, for I know you are well informed about this side of that equation. I simply wonder, are we able to “see” the whole picture as accurately and holistically as possible, most of the time?
Human rights defenders are hesitant to defend non-derogable rights in the face of a universalising crisis which at first glance appears to warrant the suspension, but is it at the expense of permanently losing Australia's liberal democracy?
The accelerated self-education in misguided exceptionalism for some NGOs clarified the inimitable moral and epistemological duty to question everything continuously, including one’s own motives and biases, but especially of those in power.
There has been little to no Parliamentary inquiry into the emergency measures. These include curfews (which government officials admit have no supporting evidence for efficacy), exorbitant fines for breaches of mandates, that authorised officers can break into any land, building, structure or vehicle using whatever force necessary, put people into quarantine and compel them into medical tests and treatment, and do so with impunity, often without having to show credentials or a warrant. Many of these measures are being enforced by the Australian Defence Forces, whose duties now include reconnaissance, planning and contact tracing teams, frontline medical assistance and supporting mandatory quarantine arrangements.
Given few other recourses to showcase their dissent, people have taken to the streets. Unbridled and incendiary police violence was shown recently during protests, including rubber bullets fired at close range at the backs of fleeing protestors and indiscriminate use of pepper spray and capsicum canisters, setting harmful precedents. They were joined by an armoured vehicle piled high with police in paramilitary gear and body armour, carrying military-style semiautomatic guns as well as a Long-Range Acoustic Device (the sort the Australian police forces bought up in large numbers several years ago, with no transparency around quantity and guidelines for use) which is capable of inflicting traumatic brain injury. Despite no armed terrorism threat being identified in the September protests, the Special Operations Group, the counter-terrorism arm of the Victorian Police, were deployed. All of this is especially worrying given the building of mass quarantine facilities which may be used to unfairly and inhumanely intern Australians who meet the ever-widening criteria of a ‘public health threat’ under these emergency measures. An amendment to the Biosecurity Act is currently under Parliamentary review, and would alter the scope of authorised biosecurity control officers’ jurisdiction by extending their powers from over “an individual” to a “class of individuals” which arguably could include entire swathes of individuals such as “the unvaccinated”.
Protestors have been thoroughly vilified by the media and the Andrews Government, characterised as selfish, cowardly and riotous “right-wing extremists” and “Neo-Nazis”. While some elements of these belief and value systems will be evident in any segment of the population, casting the particular broad aspersion of extremism – without supporting evidence - on average Australians is particularly dangerous. The assertion instigates a justification for serious infringements of civil rights. As Law Professor Michael Heade has explained, extensive statutory provisions (92 to be precise) have been introduced since the 9/11 terror attacks which empower Australian government ministers to call out the ADF to manage “domestic violence”, including a perceived threat to “Commonwealth interests,” which casts quite a wide net. Protestors have recently also been described as engaging in criminal behaviour, including destruction of property. This is especially pertinent in the context of what Heade drew attention to on several occasions over the years, which are the abilities given to ADF to use lethal force to protect “declared infrastructure.” He notes, “politically, the key question is: why have these powers been created on the pretext of combatting terrorism when the provisions are far wider? The only conclusion that can be drawn is that preparations are being made to mobilise the armed forces domestically for purposes other than counter-terrorism, such as to deal with ‘rioting’ or other forms of civil unrest.” Professor Heade wrote this one year before the passing of the Defence Legislation Amendment (Enhancement of Defence Force Response to Emergencies) Bill 2020, which further augments these powers by allowing foreign military forces to assist ADF in “emergencies” and gives them immunity from civil and criminal prosecution for their actions.
As one publication observed, demonstrators were made up of “anti-government libertarians, anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown activists, conspiracy theorists and self-identified bikie club members, as well as construction workers and trade union members angered by the state government’s shuttering of their industry.” Most recently, groups of alleged healthcare workers gathered silently in parks in Melbourne, socially distanced and masked, asking for their concerns to be noted. Protests have grown in size every weekend since then, and become more diverse. Given that no clear determination has been made on the exact demographic composite that makes up dissenters, it may be more prudent to interpret the wide variety of those resisting are simply ordinary Australians, unified by similar concerns, rather than similar ideologies. Similar protests have been recorded all over the world, lending credibility to the assumption that these concerns are universally held by a sizeable portion of the public and not an aberration of the conceited or maverick. Rather than dividing the community by encouraging the public to demonise protestors as fragmented, extremist and self-centered, elected officials may want to consider a more compassionate and democratic approach to addressing this constituency’s concerns, whilst targeting only clear violations and criminal activity of particular individuals. ‘Extremist’ is a label that has long been used for subjective and political ends, without consideration for the use of violence in politics that perpetuates discontent. For a State that is part of the Stronger Cities Network, an initiative to increase community resilience and social cohesion, Victoria appears to be doing its very best to erode at community trust.
It is also judicious to assess the recent trends of militarised crowd control to suppress dissent in concert with increasing secrecy in the National Cabinet and expansive executive and unilateral law-making within the halls of Australian government. Much of it, such as in Victoria, is being made permanent and codified in law using the public health emergency as its premise, including by using mandates to sideline and block MPs from voting. The divisive and troubling Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Bill 2021, if passed, will allow the Premier to “rule by decree”, execute orders based on characteristics and attributes of any kind, including putting individuals deemed as public health risks in detention for up to two years after an oblique assessment of such, to discriminate on the basis of political beliefs, and impose exorbitant fines for any offence. The bill is currently tabled until the next sitting, as it would not pass in its current form. The question must be asked: For what reason was it drafted in secrecy and Parliament and the public given little to no time for consultation in the first instance? Why would such a bill be designed, be necessary, be inflicted upon the Victorian people?
The Andrews government has blocked a request by the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner for the scientific evidence underpinning the State’s sixth lockdown. Meanwhile, NSW has recently declined to release documents illustrating cabinet deliberations, citing “public interest immunity” though presumably providing the evidence base for mandatory workplace vaccination (as was under review in this instance at the NSW Supreme Court) would be in the interest of the public rather than prejudicial to it. The Andrews Government has recently suffered an “exodus” of long-serving staff, and is now well regaled for operating with impunity, “its work shielded from freedom of information requests, parliamentary scrutiny and public inquiries”. Thus far, this loss in credibility has not stopped the mandates and reprehensible use of police force, a department significantly expanded under Andrews’ regime which now imprisons Victorians at a rate not seen since the late 19th century. We simply do not have enough safeguards in place to maintain government accountability and transparency. Premier Andrews and male members in his Cabinet continue to use routine press conferences to gaslight and denigrate their constituency (as has the NSW Health Minister to colleagues on multiple occasions), a behaviour that most would have described as “toxic masculinity” at its best, but this ire was reserved for protestors instead. We have historically railed against patriarchal alchemy, which turns the individual against the communal, values competition over collaboration, war and securitisation over trust and resilience, the domination of others over love and compassion, a dogmatic rationality and technocracy, total control over nature (in this case a pathogen) and above all - rational justification of it all in the name of Truth (‘trust the experts’ and ‘trust the science’). Yet this is precisely what our new world looks like, and we remain silent and abiding.
Meanwhile, the panopticon has quietly arrived - through widespread use of facial recognition technology, at-home monitoring, a possibly insecure federated digital identification system, vaccine certificates driving interoperable digital identification schemes at a global level, and a bill up for review in Victorian Parliament called the Health Legislation Amendment (Information Sharing) Bill 2021 which will allow disclosure of all patient health data of all Victorians to third parties, circumventing the need to obtain consent of the individual. Biometric IDs can facilitate social protection, as well as result in grave harms, but the breakneck speed at which all this is occurring is – in my view – preventing thoughtful discussion on this.
I keep wondering – when will social reformers pause to reflect? When will this reflection be ‘socially permissible’?
Recently, the “Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology was systematically proven: the construct of left-wing authoritarianism. Experts have, for many decades, used social conservatism interchangeably with right-wing authoritarianism, the only kind they recognised, even though several core markers such as dogmatism, cognitive rigidity, prejudice and lethal partisanship are evident across the political spectrum. The exact relationship between political ideologies and authoritarianism requires further exploration. Most concerning is that researchers detect a “neuroticism” in the attitude of left-wing authoritarians, a perception that the world is a dangerous place, a rabid belief in science, and willingness to ban opposing views to attain what they perceive to be an idealistic goal. Despite being ‘anti-establishment’, the study confirms left-wing authoritarians expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralised State control if it furthers their vision. Paradoxically, for an industry that purports through all its advocacy on power and bias to be anti-hierarchal, humanitarian-development organisations’ cooperation with the status-quo has abetted an unprecedented concentration of power in the political elite. Many dormant authoritarian personality traits are emerging, including an attitude that supports “top-down censorship” and “anti-conventionalism” or the segregation and ostracisation of individuals with views seen to be “selfish”, if justified by the goal of eradicating the SARS-COV-2 pathogen which many, rightly so, ascertain to be most dangerous to the most vulnerable in society.
Sometimes it is the moral absolutism of progressive values that paralyses the ability to think critically – that is, to be an open-minded sceptic, considering all perspectives while simultaneously aware of the assumptions and normative biases.
Under international human rights law, which was formulated with contributions from Australia as Prime Minister Morrison boasted recently at the United Nations General Assembly, public service officials have a responsibility to demonstrate that any limitations they put on rights are proportionate to the perceived threat. It is important that all information be interpreted using the precautionary principle, which guides us to make decisions based on the best available evidence while acknowledging the uncertainties that remain and above all take a do no harm approach as our basis.
The Australian government has violated these principles by selectively analysing pandemic modelling from other countries and from within its own borders to justify universal application of risk management measures, despite risk not being shared equally across the population for this disease. Data is revealed every day which confirms that stringent control measures are creating greater collateral damage than the benefit generated.
Meanwhile, universal vaccine mandates contravene fundamental human rights, and while it is possible there could be a justified abrogation if the policy resulted from meaningful, evidence-based and transparent deliberation, these policies have been formulated in undemocratic ways. Both our instincts and our expertise should be clamouring in our minds and hearts, asking us to explore more deeply, question more rigorously, perceive more broadly, in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of doctrine and orthodoxy which is suffocating our ability to respectfully question, nuance, dissent, ruminate and propose.
I can already hear the sharp rebuke to all this, tersely reminding me that I am not a medical expert, and this is true. My rejoinder to this is that my line of work often requires myself and colleagues to rapidly become technically competent on a range of complex issues, which deal with the politically charged, which deal with human development, and which occasionally put us in morally ambiguous waters. I imagine it should be allowable that we leverage our intellect and our moral convictions here, too, as we have anywhere else we felt social justice required voice. Furthermore, my civic responsibility and my civic virtues compel me to make ethical, informed decisions when it comes to public policy in my country, especially policy which will affect the lives of the most precious and vulnerable in our society – our children. These policies and mandates, while passed off as scientific consensus, increasingly appear to be a carefully curated and manufactured consensus due to rife censorship and vilification of opposing views. This includes not providing a platform for meaningful analysis of the views of 58,000 scientists and medical practitioners who signed the Great Barrington Declaration and more than 12,000 who have signed the Rome Declaration. It need not be mutually exclusive to both rigorously question directives and care deeply about finding solutions to end the pandemic. Our loyalty is not to the leviathan of government, our loyalty is to the people, to each other, to ourselves and to inviolable human rights. I feel we have allowed our government to redefine love as fear – to show we care we must exhibit constant fear of the contagion and therefore of each other and this replaces faith in the ‘everyday virtues’ of self-responsibility, tolerance, forgiveness, trust and resilience.
According to the TGA, all Covid-19 vaccines on the market are given “provisional approval…subject to certain strict conditions, such as the requirement…to continue providing information to the TGA on longer term efficacy and safety from ongoing clinical trials and post-market assessment.” It should therefore be the right of an individual to refuse participation in what can reasonably be constituted to be a medical and scientific experiment that currently has no long-term safety assessments and cannot guarantee significant communal protection. If a personal calculation of risks and benefits results in determining that taking a Covid-19 vaccine and boosters is a sensible idea, then that is absolutely one’s right, and this is why the vaccines should remain free and accessible. This supports personal choice. But government rhetoric has moved from persuading and coaxing to bribing, fear-mongering, coercing and punishing individuals into making this decision – and this is indefensible.
We have historically defended the fundamental rights and well-being of children. Just one example on evolving safety concerns comes to us from the deployment of Moderna’s Spikevax: Moderna’s vaccine product continues to be offered to children in Australia, despite no fewer than at least six countries recommending it not be given to individuals under 30 due to known adverse effects.
We have historically been watchdogs of corporate corruption, yet Pfizer, a company which has settled multiple lawsuits for fraudulent marketing, bribery and data manipulation in prior product development, is trusted unreservedly with providing a safe, effective product for ourselves and our children. It is also a manufacturer afforded zero liability for injuries resulting from this product. Understandably, for many, this does not inspire confidence or trust in the product. An investigative report in the British Medical Journal now casts doubt on the initial clinical trial Pfizer BioNtech conducted for its adherence to every aspect of bio-ethics protocols. Is it unreasonable for civil society to rally for a moratorium on the vaccine mandates (given this manufacturer’s vaccine is now the predominant one in use here and will be used for all booster shots) until a thorough investigation can be completed?
We have historically protected the reproductive rights of women, yet when women are condescended to and dismissed over concerns that Covid-19 vaccines are affecting their menstrual cycles, we have remained silent. When, months later, studies were instigated to study exactly this phenomenon, we have remained ambivalent. When, an influential study supporting the recommendation to give this suite of vaccines to pregnant women and women of child-bearing age was amended to remove assertions it made around specific miscarriage rates in vaccinated women being at expected levels, given the study period lasted three months, policy did not alter.
We have always protected the bodies of all. This year, the United Nations Population Fund released a report entitled “My Body, My Choice.” As the press release exhorts:
“For the first time, a United Nations report focuses on bodily autonomy – the power and agency to make choices about your body without fear of violence or having someone else decide for you.”
These are just some of the valid concerns Australians have articulated over the last year, yet policymakers and the media continue to insult and disparage them, reducing them to pejoratives like “anti-vaxxers” in the hopes that we will shrug and look away. Those who ascertain the vaccines are safe and effective need not agree that any of the concerns presented are valid. Everyone need only agree that as a result of the complexity, the violation of basic rights and the undemocratic manner in which all policy is being created, the decision to take a Covid-19 vaccine must remain a choice. If individuals who are informed do not give consent, that choice must be respected.
Here are just some of the human rights conventions and domestic policies which are being eroded, circumscribed, bypassed and contravened entirely by medical intervention mandates and vaccine passports:
1. The official Australian Immunisation Handbook, which states that for consent to be legally valid, “It must be given voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation.” (s.2.1.3).
2. The Commonwealth Constitution which prohibits civil conscription in medical and dental services (s.51(23A)).
3. Non-derogable (absolute, inalienable) rights in Article 4 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which includes Article 7: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.
4. The UNESCO Statement on Bioethics and Human Rights, which states “Any preventative diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason, without disadvantage and without prejudice” (Art.6).
5. The Nuremberg Code, which states “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision” (Article 1).
6. Victorian Charter for Human Rights and Responsibilities which protects Victorians from “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and the right to “freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief” (Section 10 & 14).
Is this argument reasonable? Is this path of reasoning coming from a place of selfishness and shortsightedness? I do not think so. It is coming from a measured, grounded and practical sensibility, and it is also coming from a deep and abiding honouring of sacrosanct human rights as first principles we can always confidently return to, time and again.
What are the benchmarks we can go back to, to ensure we ‘do the right thing’ the right way?
Former Supreme Court Justice Kevin Bell makes a compelling argument for the suspension or calibration of human rights in the current environment, where justified, provided we see “human rights limiting measures that result from deliberative processes that are objective, evidence-based and informed. Such processes are more likely to lead to limitations that are necessary for legitimate purposes, minimally intrusive, time-bound, targeted, proportionate, certain, non-discriminatory and transparent.” As illustrated, the measures implemented by various State governments have been neither evidence-based, nor targeted, nor transparent, and are unlikely to be temporary, considering the permanent changes to surveillance and policing infrastructure and making discrimination on the basis of vaccination status lawful.
Opportunities for error correction are rapidly closing, with sweeping and intrusive surveillance powers being expanded to law enforcement, Big Tech encouraged to close down online discourse, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) threatening regulatory action to health practitioners who nuance or oppose public health orders and advice, a media in disrepute for its lack of independence, and a “marked cultural shift in Australian politics” which has resulted in punitive measures towards journalists and their sources who publish information that questions government policy. Australia remains the only liberal democracy in the world without a human rights act, which prohibits full respect and accountability for human rights. Meanwhile, all governments know the secret to successfully enacting hegemony is that it requires the complacency and assistance of neighbours, friends, and colleagues because “the desire to cleanse society of the enemy is what compels compliance.”
Let us dispassionately acknowledge that because of the expedited process of vaccine development and pandemic control policy these last two years, we are continuing to learn and grow with regard to how best to respond to the public health threat. Meanwhile, under the weight of fear and – I would gently posit, a desire for social conformity (confused with ‘unity’) – we are rapidly relinquishing autonomy over our bodies, and our children’s bodies. This is of course irreversible and opens the door to many other personal autonomy and bodily integrity violations, as well as runs roughshod over the right to free and informed consent.
Back to the question of preventing prior ‘pandemics’ of preventable deaths which we mentally ‘walked past’: what I have learned is that with enough fear and a good dose of hypnosis, one can convince an entire nation to ideologically conform for the greater public good. In our current era, this has been posited as the amorphous utilitarian goal of preventing the spread of a pathogen that turns every healthy or asymptomatic human being into a potential diseased threat, making the innate biological state unlawful and every person a potential enemy. A threat presented initially to be of catastrophic proportions and seemingly forbidden from recalibration.
Please don’t mistake my tone – it is not one of irreverence or one that attempts to trivialise the ongoing assessment of the nature, scope and severity of this particular public health threat. It is one of genuine inquiry, into the nature of the situation, and into our psychic resilience/malaise when it comes to critical thinking in a crisis, under duress. Information has become a tool and a weapon. Who and what to trust? My answer, for myself, has been to trust my intuition, my training, my intellect, and my core values which act as my compass. Civil and human rights defenders have marched in the streets and vociferously defended ideals, and have long been concerned with how to break the cycles that reproduce harmful social norms and conditioned responses. Most approaches require a process of meaningful, critical appraisal and consciousness raising as a stimulus for enhancing ‘power within’.
After the demoralising and exhausting lockdowns and androcentric, technocratic response to the pandemic threat, we, ourselves, have never felt less empowered. And perhaps that explains why we are, in a sense, surrendering to the new reality being created for us, one where absolute human rights can be circumscribed into oblivion, where freedom is a privilege meted out to you if you behave, where beliefs about a necessarily militarised, unforgiving, paternalistic, punitive, debilitatingly risk-averse, segregated, surveilled society are imposed without a second thought.
As I think about all this, I am reminded of Michel Foucault, who saw power as ubiquitous, embedded in our daily lives and institutions - not always monolithic or overtly coercive but revealed through multiple points of pressure and resistance, arising from all directions, in constant fluctuation. Power appears in the forms of truth and knowledge that we accept as assumed. It is internalised in our bodies, and we learn to discipline ourselves to conform to social norms. What new grids and scaffolds of power are we unconsciously yielding to and weaving, with every day that passes in which we participate in a two-tiered society?