Children weren’t allowed to use playgrounds in Victoria during the lockdowns – but at least they weren’t hit with rubber bullets. Photo: CraigRJD.
The COVID-19 Response Inquiry Report was released last week and sank without a trace in most media.
It was reported by Region, and it has garnered considerable interest in the Murdoch media (pick your reasons as to why), but that’s all, really.
If you had a conspiratorial bent, you might say the report was memory-holed by the same media outlets that pushed for harsh lockdowns, promised “two weeks to stop the spread” and urged us to trust the experts.
The inquiry itself was yet another tick-a-box exercise, but a lot of thought went into its establishment.
The Albanese Government ensured its design inflicted maximum pressure on the Coalition and the lamentable Morrison government, and Scott Morrison was given some whacks around the speed of procuring vaccines.
Fair call.
The report was also designed to offer some protection to the most dictatorial premiers, two of whom have become Labor folk heroes for their electoral successes but not their achievements – the execrable Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan – and she who can’t be spelled, Anastas … Annastasia Paluchay … Annastacia Palaszc … the former Queensland premier.
The terms of reference gravely stated: “Actions taken unilaterally by state and territory governments” were specifically “not in scope for the Inquiry”. So Dan Andrews scored a Get Out of Jail Free card for the world’s longest and most futile lockdowns that caused irreparable damage to the state and its citizens.
His police also fired rubber bullets at the Shrine of Remembrance, of all places, on Victorians who dared protest. That should be his epitaph.
To add insult to injury, a fortnight before the COVID report was released, Andrews was announced as the new chair of youth mental health research organisation Orygen. So the man who created so much mental illness and damage to children will now be tasked with remedying it – it’s either penance or a sick joke. Put your money on the latter.
The Orygen role pays $75,000 a year, on top of his parliamentary pension of about $300,000 a year – ‘public service’ has never been so lucrative.
The COVID report will spawn a new agency – the Australian Centre for Disease Control, named, believe it or not, after the US Centers for Disease Control, through which the research that almost certainly created the COVID-19 pandemic was almost certainly funded. (Remember when suggesting that could get you banned on social media for spreading ‘misinformation’?)
One reason we’re getting the new Centre is to counter said misinformation (false or misleading information that is spread either intentionally or unintentionally; referenced in the report 81 times) and disinformation (similar to misinformation, but it’s spread with the intent to deceive; referenced in the report 34 times).
Although not mentioned, for future reference, there’s also mal-information, which is true information that is spread with the intent to harm someone’s reputation or cause other forms of harm – aka, speech government doesn’t like, aka politics.
To keep us ‘safe’, under Action 19, the Centre for Disease Control will include a strategy for addressing the harms arising from misinformation and disinformation, which incorporates:
- Information environment and ongoing narrative monitoring to combat misinformation
- Transparent engagement with social media companies
- Promotion and coordination of policies to increase the resilience of the information environment
- Partnership between government and trusted organisations, experts, media, and other influencers to pre-bunk and debunk misinformation.
There are surely good reasons to have trusted information channels, but these sound a little ‘Orwellian’ and should ring alarm bells.
As the meme goes, Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not an instruction manual.
Remember, ‘pre-bunking’ (bullet point four) was the reason the social media companies throttled the 100 per cent true Hunter Biden laptop story because the social media companies were told months before it became public that something like the laptop story could be released as ‘Russian disinformation’ …
And damnit!
It’s happened. Did you catch it?
When you start thinking about how governments manipulate information and, therefore, us, and start worrying about the freedoms we have and the freedoms we used to have and the ones we are on the cusp of losing, you find yourself in the rabbit hole and sound like you’re about to be fitted for a tinfoil hat (size 58; wide brim, please). Then you have to start justifying why you’re concerned about government when all government wants is to keep us safe. And you like to be safe, don’t you?
Sometimes, not so much.
The COVID inquiry shows how governments failed. And how the experts failed. And how the media failed to hold both to account.
It cited human rights abuses, especially of the 3000 residents of the nine Flemington and North Melbourne public housing towers who were locked down for five to nine days without warning.
The residents were mainly from refugee and migrant culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
In December 2020, the Victorian Ombudsman found that the state government breached their human rights and that the timing of this measure did not reflect health advice.
The residents were locked down in July 2020 during the second lockdown (9 July to 27 October 2020, a total of 111 days).
Victoria endured four more lockdowns. During one, a pregnant woman was arrested for wanting to organise a protest through social media (what you might call “narrative monitoring” – bullet point one).
Three years after the lockdown, in August 2023, the Supreme Court approved a $5 million settlement from the Victorian Government to the residents of the towers – about $1600 per resident.
Who says you can’t put a price on freedom?
The COVID inquiry should have been a chance for all levels of government to come clean about what they did and why.
We should have discovered how much of what they did was on ‘health advice’ and how much was public relations advice.
Instead, the government is grabbing more power as a result of an inquiry that showed they shouldn’t have been entrusted with the power they had.
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