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I wrote in April as the Wuhan hysteria was being embraced by our governing class that:
Until now we have only experienced political correctness in its authoritarian rather than totalitarian form. I have a strong intuition that is about to change very quickly. I am almost wholly convinced that we will not have the capacity or the will to resist the Left when it chooses to deliver the coup de main to what remains of our liberties and our institutions.
Well, we are about to know whether I was right. Every Australian knew this morning what went down in Ballarat on Tuesday night. After all, it was livestreamed right up until the mobile phone transmitting it was taken from the man with the child in his arms.
I taught myself how to livestream this morning. I now see that if I had been that man in Ballarat I would have been left with no corroborative record of what happened when those masked men and women entered my home. I am also resolved to quickly learn other skills and to re-acquaint myself with the efficient handling of other instruments of defence. I counsel you to do the same. I say this soberly. Hyperbole is out of place. In any event, for anyone who watched what happened to the Ballarat mother on Tuesday night, hyperbole is redundant.
As in Victoria yesterday, so it may be in any other state tomorrow. The cultural virus of leftism is the problem. It entered our Commonwealth at least 50 years ago and has never encountered any organised institutional resistance; the possibility of maintaining a herd immunity from such a malady was long ago extinguished by our schools and theatres and parliaments and by our media, and our public broadcaster in particular. Victoria has had more “COVID cases” than other state to be sure, but to describe a virus with the incidence and transmissibility and relatively low lethality of this one as a “pandemic” is a to carry out the same perverse deconstruction of meaning and clarity in the medical lexicon, as the Left have done for decades to our legal, aesthetic and moral vocabularies.
With improbable irony, The Centre for Disease Control in America issued its GSCC (great statistical COVID correction) on the very day the Victorian Legislative Council extended the state’s “emergency” response by six months. Do you hear of it on ABC News or read of it in the establishment press? No, of course not, yet the CDC has made an authoritative pronouncement that the numbers of COVID deaths have been grossly exaggerated in the United States by public authorities, including the CDC itself. Australian governments and those in thrall to them have been guilty of the same deliberate, unscientific, and misleading statements about the magnitude of the risk presented by the virus .
To die with Covid is not the same as to die of Covid. We have known this from the start.
Of the 190,000 deaths in the US attributed to the virus, 94 per cent have involved an average of 2.6 “co-morbidities” i.e. there have been two or three other explanations for such deaths. That is hardly surprising, given that the CDC correction also notes that the average age of such decedents is 80 years (the average age at death generally in the US is 78.9 years). The position is essentially the same here and throughout the rest of the world. The statistics only confirm our personal experiences and the inferences we have drawn from them over the last six months.
I say “we” but that is careless. Many people are unwilling to allow either their own experience or the truth about the virus to inform their judgements about the virus and the calamitous response to it by our governments.
Let me get personal and tell you of an email exchange I had about the Ballarat lady’s arrest on Wednesday. It was with someone relatively close to me, younger than me and known to me heretofore as a kindly disposed if reflexively liberal individual. I sent her the video clip of the arrest, curious of her reaction. This is how she responded to me :
Saw it already. I do feel sorry for her. She’s in over her head. Was organising an anti-lockdown protest on the weekend. It is currently illegal, as was a recent black lives matter protest. In my opinion, being arrested, though distressing, wasn’t violent.
I believe being part of a rally with possibly 100’ or maybe several thousand people, presumably without masks, in a state overwhelmed with Covid cases, is a far more dire situation for her unborn child.
I was surprised by her response to the point of disquiet; distress might be a better word for my reaction. I know her to be a mother of children. She reads literature of the old canon regularly. She has a sense of humour. She is, as I have already said, a kind person, generous to her friends and family. How can she be so unconcerned, so dogmatic and so wrong in her response to what happened to this woman?
Note in particular:
1/ how she patronises the victim of this outrage: she is “over her head” she says, implying surely she should not be permitted to express a view about a matter of vital public concern, let alone attend a demonstration; that is the preserve of other folk, I suppose, the bien pensant like her, ABC-watching and listening, metropolitan and secure in their sense of cultural ascendance;
2/ how illegality itself is her criterion for judging the woman; this from someone who is part of a generation indulgent of lawlessness, if not anomie.;
3/ how carelessly and casually scientifically illiterate she is. Mandatory masking is medically indefensible and infant mortality from this virus in next to completely unknown. No matter. Everyone in authority and on the television and with whom she interacts says these things and so incuriosity and conformity meet again in the arena of the politically correct;
4/ how callous her attitude to a pregnant mother is, and to a person whom the video shows is manifestly not belligerent or rude and who is married or who lives with someone who appears on the evidence of the video to be of the same disposition. Remember my correspondent is a mother herself. Surely it does not require negative capability of the kind possessed by Keats for her to imagine herself being in the same position as the mother in the video while pregnant with one of her own children;
5/ how she pointlessly references Black Lives Matter,unless of course the purpose of such reference was to remind me that protest can only ever be licit if it is leftist. The subtext is, perhaps, that if BLM cannot protest then for someone like this rural peon to think that she should be allowed to do so is simply impertinent.
How many folk like this correspondent of mine do you know? How many such persons are you obliged to be friendly with through work or family circumstance, or have to deal with or are suffered to endure on the airwaves or on the bus or sitting next to you at the coffee shop? How did such people come to be the only kind who get to speak at all of our public ceremonies, sit in our parliaments, write all of our dramas, set all of our standards, assemble all of our intangible social infrastructure and teach all our children? How did it come about that they set the very tone of our cultural exchanges and select the very shades through which we are allowed to look upon on our past?
…conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought
— Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1
There must be a lot of them because together they can elect Marxists like Daniel Andrews to govern the states in which they live and elect Liberals like Scott Morrison to the prime ministership so that he can give the like of Andrews seats at the national cabinet.
Scott Morrison has told us, remember, (they are his own words) that he has “zero interest” in participating in the war of defence against our cultural dismantlement which has left us with a political dispensation of the kind which saw a distressed and pregnant mother in Ballarat arrested and handcuffed in her own home in front of her children. Since then, as per the clip below, it has only grown worse.
That a person should be charged with an offence for merely signalling her support for a peaceful protest is serious enough but was made worse by the conduct of witless police officers unable to discern how grossly inappropriate was the decision to arrest this woman, given the offence she was believed by them to have committed (“incitement” to breach these novel emergency regulations) and how grossly disproportionate their mode of arrest was in light of her co-operative conduct and the circumstances within her home.
My strong intuition is that the livestreamed event will be a significant event for many people. I can tell you sincerely that it was such for me. I believe that how we each react to what we saw will put us on either side of a luminous wide line. I expect to be on the less populous side of the line but I know I will be in good company.
In the meantime I am searching out the name of the group who organised the protest event the young mother wished to attend. I am told that they are organising a national event on Saturday. I will be there. While in attendance I will not wear a mask. Nor will I distance myself from my companions. I will not do either of those things because neither would do anything meaningful or even measurable to prevent the statistically infinitesimal chance of me spreading or catching a virus that is by, many orders of magnitude, less potent than the influenza virus.
Doing that and dealing with anything arising it from of it will be easy.
But civil disobedience of a kind that will carry more serious consequences will be required of us soon enough, I expect.
Stuart Lindsay is a retired Federal Circuit Court Judge. He is not a resident of Victoria, so Daniel Andrews’ personal police force will need to find another door to kick in
You have been counted, Thought Criminal #13348807. (The People’s Cube) We’re all Thought Criminals by implication of reading Quadrant.
Please post info about location and time of protests, so we call all go.
The MSM is not circulating any information, about from the expected derision of the organisers as fools.
“… the mortality rate of those infected with the virus is less than .03%; that is to say, only three in a thousand of those who contract the virus die of it. ”
I could be wrong, but I think that this translates as three in ten thousand.
If anyone can look at these two videos and not be disgusted at what the Victorian Police Force is doing our name, then I can only assume you are a product of generations of low IQ, incurious, yes-persons. Or the offspring of married first cousins.
VicPol is destroying the trust of the community they theoretically SERVE. It takes far more to restore a reputation than to wilfully destroy it. I don’t care that this young mum did something that is only illegal because Dan Andrews declared it to be so.
And the community is destroying its underlying trust relationships as well, with widespread dobbing by those who cannot wait to accumulate brownie points for their civic duty of turning in a neighbour.
It is flat out wrong. Worse still, VicPol and it’s minions hauled out the Nuremberg defence of following orders to justify their inexcusable overreach.
I’m on the same side of the line, Stuart. But I have no idea as to how to best fight this tyrannical enemy.
This entire virus thing has exposed deep differences in peoples allegiences and preferences. Even if Diktator Dan resigned tomorrow things have gone too far. I have always tried to be on good terms with those I disagree with and I have had strong differences of opinion with even family members. However this has exposed those who have no problem with authority and tyranny and those who want to be free. This divide is going to become more stark over the next few months. I don’t know how or when (if ever) the rift can be healed. I personally have stopped speaking to those I know who fully support Andrews and are always making excuses for him. I have no trouble with differences of opinion and outlook but I can’t remain friends with those who are happy and even encourage the establishment of a totalitarian fascist state.
Australia nd Victoria in particular are going to be divided for many years to come, in a bitter unpleasant way. Next stop riots like in the US at this time.
I meant to say that although I have had deep differences with others I have always remained on good terms with them, now it’s different, I doubt I can do that after this slide into despotism.
Thank you Stuart.
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Sadly, I think we need to prepare for an apathetic response at best – we have become a nation of FLAINOs. Freedom Loving Aussies In Name Only.
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Forty years ago, at a flash Victorian school, I sat through a year 12 lecture given by
a guest speaker – Beatrice Faust. We students sat silently as she spoke on things antithetical to mainstream mores of the day, and we politely clapped as she left the room. When the applause stopped, our teacher and returned soldier, Mr Clarke expressed his dismay and distress to the whole class that no one had the courage to stand in opposition to the attack on our society we had just listened to.
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At the time I didn’t “get it” and didn’t understand Mr Clarke’s crazy outburst. I do now and wish we had all taken it more seriously.
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FLAINOs https://www.pprune.org/jet-blast/635249-dark-day-australia.html
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(Posted Friday 4 Sept 17:37 EST)
>”Scott Morrison has told us, remember, (they are his own words) that he has “zero interest” in participating in the war of defence against our cultural dismantlement …”
Yet while the State Govts and their CMO’s create havoc, aided by the MSM, Morrison funds them with JobKeeper. If that programme was dismantled, Andrews et al would have an impossible task in holding their line. Morrison will not cut that spending off, of course, since then Albanese would grab the opportunity to play saviour.
It seems to me that Andrews and Sutton are now playing the hard collectivist card using C-19 as a golden opportunity to coerce a fearful populace into aquiescence. Perhaps they consider this a global opportunity – a template.
Stuart,
In my Melbourne circles, opinion is strongly to leave the police out of it as they are following orders; then that the involved female was treated appropriately given the evidence favouring an intent to incite.
Personally, the videos I have seen of hot spots in USA allow interpretation that the lawlessness of agitators was left uncorrected for too long. Nipping in the bud seems better than Burning, Looting, Murdering.
Geoff S
GS:
Surely the violence in the USA is not being caused by defenceless pregnant women in pyjamas! Rather it is being caused by revolutionary activist thugs such as BLM – the very same people who staged the big protest in Melbourne under Stage 3 restrictions, which the police did nothing to prevent.
No doubt the organisers of that unsavoury event, which really is the potential precursor of the type of violence you’re worried about, are today plotting their next outrage, unmolested by the police. Evidently Daniel Andrews has no intention of nipping BLM protests in the bud.
We seem to be seeing selective application of the law against the Premier’s political opponents. I note that the lady in Ballarat mentioned her concerns regarding loss of human rights, wrecked economy, jobs gone, etc) i.e. her protest was specifically against the Premier and his government.
I was about to comment in general terms, then saw Sherrington’s idiocy. The lady in question is not an agitator. She is clearly a sensible person who has lost her job and is otherwise of the rational view that the lockdown is causing more harm than any good it is doing; if it is doing any good at all. And she will not turn into an arsonist or looter, nor will those of like mind – only leftists take such turns. Thankfully, I am not in Sherrington’s Melbourne circles and therefore do not absolve those who are merely following orders; particularly those who deal heavy-handedly with a young pregnant woman.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary……H.L. Mencken
Beginning with the “war on DDT” brought about by Rachel Carson, then the acid rain scare, the ozone hole scare and many other imaginary hobgoblins, we have endured the “Global Warming” scam, the most egragious hoax to be perpetrated on humanity………until now. The “plandemic” is clearly nothing but another campaign to put fear into the hearts of the populace.
This is what this hoax has been all about. “The New Normal”, “New World Order”, “The Great Reset”.
Since May I have questioned the validity of the PCR test. One thing I learned about Engineering is that if you trust data, you need to know where that data comes from and what it means. The “test for Covid 19” is a total FARCE!
The idea that a face diaper is in any way shape or form to filtering a virus is illogical and wrong. It is akin to coralling mosquitoes in a barbed wire fende. The CDC itself has studied this idiocy and has reported that a face diaper poses more downside risk than benefit.
Turns out, 90% of the positive “cases” have been either some other coronavirus (common cold) or there is not enough to make one sick.
And 6% of those that are chalked up as “Covid Deaths” are actually caused by the disease. (Or the Italians say it is only 1 to 4 per cent)
Which explains:
Why it appears to attack the old and the sick.
Why people test positive but have no symptoms.
Why people who are healthy recover.
Why the media placed an emphasis on “the cases” rather than the deaths.
Why there is no significant increase in either total deaths or deaths in old age homes, anywhere.
Why the number of annual deaths from teh flu, lower respiratory failure, and dementia have dropped this year by the same amount of “covid deaths”.
Why they ignore obvious cures such as HCQ and Ivermectin (and even cough syrup!) and insist on waiting for a vaccine.
The whole purpose was to make the populace afraid and accustomed to being ordered to do ridiculous things.
We have stood idly by as the “climate change” nonsense made vast inroads into our properity. Are we now going to stand idly by whilie this hoax make vast inroads into the freedoms for which so many fought and died?
Thankyou for your personal courage in putting yourself forward on this Stuart. I note Andrews and Sutton are ow dredging up historical deaths in aged care facilities who have died with coronavirus and not from it to bolster their death statistics as propaganda for their moronic actions. This nothing short of a gross public fraud and both individuals should be dragged before the courts under the relevant state service Act and hung out to dry!
Peter Smith – excellent retort.
@ Robyn YES.
f anyone can look at these two videos and not be disgusted at what the Victorian Police Force is doing our name, then I can only assume you are a product of generations of low IQ, incurious, yes-persons. Or the offspring of married first cousins.
*And the community is destroying its underlying trust relationships as well, with widespread dobbing by those who cannot wait to accumulate brownie points for their civic duty of turning in a neighbour.
*I’m on the same side of the line, Stuart. But I have no idea as to how to best fight this tyrannical enemy.
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What a soul destroing week we have just watch unfold.
I figured it was a nice ‘neighbour who dobbed her.
Reminds me of WW2 and the gestapo.
Cicero [do they still teach Cicero at school?] taught “salus populi suprema lex” = the health of the people overrides any law. Our very own High Court applied this doctrine in opening the state borders In the case of Gratwick versus Johnson in 1945, during World War II.
The lady arrested by the bold gendarmes in Ballarat, actually understands the Art of Medicine far better than any doctor trained in Marxist Pseudoscience.
The video depicts an outrage, and the caution that we should all learn to live-stream is very well taken by me, and I hope by many others too.
On a note of hope, not everyone reacts as your friend, a young educated ABC watching mother did.
I have a 36 year old son, a lawyer, happily married with a young toddler. I’ve always seen him as apolitical, busy, mild and kindly, but of his generation – full of climate worries and other leftist concerns. Nevertheless, he was outraged enough by the video to write to both of his members of Parliament to complain about the police behaviour and the general policy of support for endless lockdowns. He received back the usual boilerplate, and replied back to these politicians that his generation could read the international Covid scientific debate on the internet, and taking their responses point by point and refuting them, he asked these politicians to please stop lying to him. His letters of course will be ignored, but I regard them as important signifiers of a change in his general attitude to politics, which he now tells me is current in his broad social circle. The pink pajama lady impelled quite an awakening – that it has come to this, etc.
Any reputable epidemiologist who understands risk and hazard at a population level could tell you that the figures being quoted daily by Daniel Andrews in his dreary fake funereal tones are completely meaningless. They actually have no bearing on the public health problem, in so so far as there is one. It is irrational to pursue damaging, non-evidence-based policies in order to “save lives” (which incidentally those policies are not not actually doing and cannot in principle achieve).
NOTE THIS from John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, and of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford, a world-leading epidemiologist (one of several – they are all saying the same thing):
“Lockdown is a nuclear weapon that destroys everything”. [video posted on YouTube 16 August 2020]
That statement alone from that particular person should be enough to put a stop to the Victorian government’s stupid and destructive “road map”.
TBL:
Fabulous quote from Cicero!
The Chief Marxist Health Officers of Australia might also take note of Hippocrates: “First do no harm”.
“The video depicts an outrage, and the caution that we should all learn to live-stream is very well taken by me, and I hope by many others too.”
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Believe it or not, there are ” dinosaurs”who have 7yo “dumb phones” that can’t video let alone live stream.
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To dispel a reasonable assumption that I’m an oldie who can’t adapt, I earned a BApplied Sc (Data Processing) in 1968 and could write the code that enables those who demean me to use their smart phones, a task that very few can, and use real computers for complex analyses hours every day, except Christmas and Good Friday.
I was able to express my thoughts ( unedited) on another site after I saw these two videos. We live in remote Qld though our adult son lives in Melbourne and desperately wants out.
I fear for his safety whilst he is stuck down there in the dungeon. There are rumours of more “rules” about to be issued up here soon. Not surprising with a state election imminent and dear leaders’ popularity soaring from lefty polls.
Had I lived in Melbourne I would certainly have been a part of the protests long before today.
I’ll be with you on the right aide of the line, which I feel is unfortunately here already.
How strange to see libertarians here defending the actions of a person who deliberately set out to be unlawful and was caught out – then for a double whammy, was proposing actions that have a high probability of making other people sick or dead.
Curious how being young, female, attractive, pregnant, a mother needing an ultrasound can distort the lenses of those who might otherwise have conventional views about crime and punishment? Geoff S
Geoff you just follow the orders of Oberfuhrer Dan, he will have need of people like you in the soon to be glorious future. In the meantime look at your relatives, friends and neighbours, I’m sure that some of them will be breaking the rules, dob them in, anonymously of course. Dan will know who you are anyway and you will ensure your prosperous future and the glory of the regime.
Oh come on now, there is far too much uncritical analysis, jumping to wrong conclusions, insnuating thoughts about others as if they were correct and worst of all, failure of classfal logic.
Think on this. In 1978 I was in Tehran as the relief manager for a large Australian project. I saw armed revolution at close quarters. We had staff wounded by violence, one by bullets. I was taken hostage at the point of a loaded machine gun by a cop who did not like me. You are free to infer, correctly, that I do not like revolution, protest gatherings, insensitive police, unlawful detention, needless violence. As one who once managed government relations for a large, respected Australian resources company, you can assume me to be the opposite of politically naive and also of leaning to the left. I dislike sovereign risk and I dislike government inventions like climate change. My degrees are in Science.
How badly some readers can misinterpret!
Geoff: are you sure your name is not really Ian MacBot as you write the same sort of snobbish and condescending tosh?
I will vote for the political party that says it will return the all money collected from anyone fined for a crime against the Dandemic totalitarian lockdown / lockup.
Surprise !!
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/probability-6-week-lockdown-victoria-commencing-9-july-2020-achieving-elimination
Elimination, not suppression is the real goal, State and Federal. I note that the MJA paper uses Taiwan as an example of elimination without acknowledging that Taiwan did not close it’s economy down. One can only hope that omission was inadvertent and not deliberately mendacious – but I doubt it.
The MJA link above was referenced by Sinclair Davidson.
Geoff Sherrington, are you attempting to put forward a sensible argument when you rest your support of Vic police actions on the alleged illegality of Buehlers actions? If you are, then perhaps you should have cited not just your managerial experience, but criminal law and constitutional law experience. There is a reason why a number of successful lawyers have jumped at the opportunity to defend this woman, – the line of High Court authority which commences with Theophanous v Herald and Weekly Times Ltd (1994) 182 CLR 104. If, as I suspect, the woman in question is acquitted due to her constitutional rights of political expression, which can not be derogated by state legislation what will you then say? The problem with your argument is it rests on a legal outcome. Far better to show, how, as a matter of fact or common sense the woman’s Facebook posts are deserving of arrest and criminal prosecution. In the end good law should be just law. The argument you are using is the exact same argument the Gestapo used. The laws enforced by the Gestapo were validly created, and the Gestapo’s actions entirely legal. That did not excuse them, nor those who supported them. Therefore explain how a citizen young or old, who is urging people to attend a protest, whilst observing precautions not to spread the disease, should be arrested and handcuffed in their home.
I , like the young woman apparently, didn’t know that a distanced, limited number, mask-wearing gathering (all as the law apparently requires) in Ballarat such as she proposed was unlawful .
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Unfortunately, I did by then know that VicPol monitors Facebook posts, or at least responds to the army of obedient dobbers .
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Geoff: full respect for your experience, but, really the distanced, masked, limited number protest would “have a high probability of making other people sick or dead.” Really? “High”? Compared to what?
Stuart, you missed the biggest whopper in your kindly mothering totalitarian friend’s reply: “a state overwhelmed with Covid cases”.
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There is no such state in the world, least of all Australia.
We are all in this together!
AFL legend Sam Newman recently told Sky News that in a “tongue in cheek aside”, he urged Victorians to “take the city/state back” and proposed 250,000 people gather in the CBD. Mr Newman said the police approached him on Wednesday and said if he was thinking of hosting a rally or even attending one then “I would be put in jail, I’d be arrested”.
No warning for the Ballarat mother who posted a similar suggestion. Victoria Police promptly entered her home, handcuffed her in front of husband and children and arrested her on a serious criminal charge of inciting illegal conduct. She’ll face court in January.
The difference between Newman and the Ballarat mother? He’s a celebrity with a public following and access to the media; he’s capable of provoking public opposition to Andrews, She was a powerless nonentity and an easy target for what looks the uniformed branch of the Victorian Labor Party [who took the knee in a public show of respect for the BLM protesters in Melbourne] to warn the public to obey the ukases of Andrews without question.
As for the argument that the Ballarat woman got what she deserved because she broke the law, the people who hid Anne Frank broke the law; the people who killed Anne Frank applied the law.
And so, before, they come to break down the door,
Forgive me, Dear Leader, I just couldn’t take any more. (Apologies to Barry Mason and Tom Jones)
Occidental,
This is becoming too extended and remote. To answer your question, although I am not a lawyer, I conceived and managed this case and others in the Federal and High courts in 1986-7. http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UTasLawRw/1989/5.pdf
One of my conclusions was that judges were not earning their reputations as diligent and detatched from influence. One Federal judge had just ended 3 years at President of the Australian Conservation Foundation but did not recuse himslf for conflict of interest. The High court judges found the main matter was getting complicated and gave up.
In summary, we seem to have had a discussion with one party having actual experience and the other having a wish list based on what would be nice. Courts do not determine the words of legislation. That is the work of politicians. I suggest thet you are wrong to believe that a court judgement about this yummy mummy would solve some uncertainty. You cited Theophanous, which was about libel, which this is not.
If you fear the application of the law, obey it or change it, but do not expect excuses or preferences to work.
Geoff S
Geoff Sherrington,
Theophanous started out as a case about libel, but ended as a case about the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution.
In our system the legislation is produced by the legislature, enforced by the executive, and interpreted and applied by the judiciary. I do not think a decision by any court resolves anything, that was the point of my post. What I was pointing out is that you seem to endorse the police actions due to their apparent legality, which in our system can be very shaky ground. What I was asking, was for you to demonstrate, as a matter of common sense the need for a law which enables police to smash in your door and arrest you for posting an encouragement to the public to participate in a political protest. I notice you made no attempt to justify the law, and I think we both know the reasons why, because you are unable to. As I said in my earlier post, the Gestapo, and for that matter the executive arms of all totalatarian governments rely on the law to justify their actions, once you fall into that trap you are half way to hell.