18C On Steroids

The idea that a sitting Tasmanian senator can be dragged before the state Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for her public comments shows the draconian reach of Australia's speech restricting anti-discrimination laws.  Claire Chandler, the Liberal Senator for Tasmania, revealed in federal parliament earlier this month that she had received a letter from the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Sarah Bolt, summoning the senator to attend a conciliation conference to answer for comments she had made in an article in the Mercury in July about — ironically enough — free speech in Australia.

In the article, Senator Chandler bemoaned the rise of cancel culture and the way it silences people for their views about sensitive topics like sex and gender identification and commented that "you don't have to be a bigot to recognise the differences between the male and female sexes and understand why women's sports, single-sex change rooms and toilets are important".

A Tasmanian constituent emailed Chandler to ask whether the senator understood the difference between "sex" and "gender".  In response, Chandler said "I do understand the difference.  That is why I have made the point in the my article that women's sports, women's toilets and women's changerooms are designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way".

Chandler's comments about gender identity and what this means for women-only facilities may not be shared by all Tasmanians, but they are undoubtedly shared by many;  and those who share them deserve to have their views articulated by their representative in the Senate.  That is not to say that only parliamentarians should have free speech, but one of the lessons from this is that if a representative of an entire state doesn't have freedom of speech, then it spells a dangerous precedent for those they represent.

Under the Tasmanian anti-discrimination legislation it was open to the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to reject the complaint for being frivolous or vexatious.  A complaint about the comments of a member of parliament as a part of a social and political debate in a public forum is the very definition of frivolous ― and yet the Commissioner has accepted the complaint in part, commenting that the Senator's comments were "problematic" and questioned whether people "should be subjected to material that is arguably offensive on the basis of gender identity and intersex variations of sex characteristics".

Senator Chandler had even posed in the Mercury article that perhaps "an open letter signed by 150 writers and academics in defence of free speech offers a glimmer of hope that we can put a stop to the anti-democratic so-called cancel culture that has taken root".  That glimmer of hope has perhaps been extinguished by institutionalised cancel culture itself, namely the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner and her Equal Opportunity agency.

If there is a cancel culture hierarchy, then anti-discrimination commissions must occupy one of the most senior positions.  Funded by taxpayers but completely independent of taxpayer accountability or control, these "independent" agencies have free reign to take discrimination complaints and pursue those who express thoughts that are out of step with modern, cosmopolitan orthodoxy backed up by a progressive elite who prefer censorship to debate.

This attack on free speech is allowed because of the chillingly broad provisions of Tasmania's anti-discrimination laws.  Everybody is familiar by now with the federal hate speech laws under s.18C of the Racial Discrimination Act which makes it unlawful for a person to offend or insult a person because of their race, colour, or ethnic or national origin.  Section 18C is an unacceptable violation of freedom of speech, but the Tasmanian laws go even further.  Section 17 of the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act 1998 makes it unlawful for a person to engage in any conduct which offends, humiliates, insults, or ridicules another person because of one of 14 protected attributes they possess, including race, age, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Curiously the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner rejected the complaint that related to the Mercury article, but accepted the part of the complaint that related to the correspondence about the article.  But there is no firm rule about why the Commissioner would say the complaint about the Mercury article is lacking in substance when a former Commissioner accepted a complaint only a few years ago that was of a very similar substance.  Back in September 2015 an anti-discrimination complaint was made by a Greens activist against the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart, Julian Porteous, for the publication of pamphlets which explained the church's position on the definition of marriage.  The complaint that the pamphlets were offensive on the basis of a person's sexual orientation was received and investigated by the Commission.  Then, as now, the content of the pamphlet was not directed towards the complainant but was considered to fall within the ambit of state anti-discrimination laws.  The decision whether to accept or reject a complaint is at the discretion of the Commissioner, which leaves freedom of speech for Tasmanians in a precarious state.

To be clear at this stage a complaint has been made and the complaint may eventually be rejected or fail at a tribunal hearing.  But the process is a part of the punishment under these kinds of laws.  The threat of compulsory conferences or mediations and tribunal hearings, and the public tarring of being associated with alleged breaches of hate speech laws, is used to scare people from speaking freely.  This is known as the law's chilling effect on free speech.

And there is nothing more chilling than seeing even elected politicians or mainstream religious leaders hauled before anti-discrimination agencies.  And that's the point — the comments made were a part of a genuine public debate, which is why they attract these complaints.  By silencing the loudest voices, anti-discrimination laws are being used to shape political debate itself.  And as long as they are on the statute books, the message is clear:  if they can get Senators and Archbishops, they can get you too.

Why I Was Right About Victoria's Police State

At the beginning of April, I wrote in these pages that Labor Premier Daniel Andrews, in response to COVID-19, had created a "police state" in Victoria.  The column ran with the standfirst:  "Economic devastation, house arrest and a police state.  Surely there could have been a better way."

I described how under Andrews the most extreme home detention laws in the country had been enacted and enforced without public debate or parliamentary scrutiny, and how the government regulations that controlled every aspect of Victorians' lives were being made and then changed, literally "hour by hour at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats".

In April, Victoria ― and indeed the whole country ― was still gripped by the fear of a virus about which little was known.  Six months ago, as politicians, scientists and the media stoked that fear, those who expressed concerns about the impact of what governments were doing to control COVID-19 on the rule of law and individuals' human rights were dismissed as "irresponsible", and worse.

Hugh Riminton, the national affairs editor of 10 News First, claimed that to question the Victorian government was "dangerous" and "ignorant".

In April, according to Newspoll, 85 per cent of Victorians believed that Andrews was handling the coronavirus "well", compared with 10 per cent who believed he was handling it "badly".  With such approval ratings, it's little wonder that at the beginning of the crisis the media and those organisations claiming they are concerned about human rights applied so little scrutiny to Andrews.  It would have been unpopular.

In June, 10,000 people in Melbourne broke the law to assemble and protest for the cause of Black Lives Matter.  The Victoria Police, for all intents and purposes, endorsed the protest and no one was arrested.  Three of its organisers were later each issued a $1652 infringement notice.

Those who argued a dangerous precedent has been set, as the police appeared to be willing to treat the government's political allies one way and its opponents another way, were largely ignored.

And so it came to pass that three weeks ago Zoe Buhler, a pregnant mother, was arrested and handcuffed by three police officers in her home, in front of her two infant children, in Ballarat and charged with the crime of "incitement", not because she had actually breached any of Victoria's health regulations, but because she had dared express her support on her Facebook page for an anti-lockdown protest.

If Buhler is convicted she will have a criminal record and be liable to a $19,000 fine.  Dozens of anti-government protesters have been arrested by Victoria Police in the past month.

All of this is the context in which the Andrews government's COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020 must be understood.  It has already passed the Victorian Parliament's lower house, where Labor has an overwhelming majority, and it will be voted on in the next new few weeks in the upper house, where independents hold the balance of power.

Two aspects of the law are particularly abhorrent.

The first is the power it gives the government to authorise anyone it chooses to exercise ― without oversight, accountability, or the right of appeal ― the draconian powers of Victoria's health regulations, which include arrest, detention, entry into homes and workplaces without a warrant, and the seizure of property.

The second is the power it gives to those so authorised by the government to arrest and indefinitely detain a person who is suspected of being someone who could potentially breach the health regulations.

Such a law has no place anywhere in Australia, ever.

This week, in a powerful statement to the Victorian Parliament, fourteen of Melbourne barristers, including QCs Michael Borsky, Stuart Wood AM, Philip Crutchfield, Georgina Schoff, and former High Court judge Michael McHugh AC, wrote:  "Authorising citizens to detain their fellow citizens on the basis of a belief that the detained person is unlikely to comply with emergency directions by the 'authorised' citizens is unprecedented, excessive and open to abuse."

To think such a law could even get as far as it has is incredible.  It demonstrates, again, the nature of the police state Victoria has become.

Please Welcome Victoria's First Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Victorian Government last week decided to announce the appointment of the first Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner, Dr Niki Vincent, to head up a new unaccountable and powerful identity-politics-based bureaucracy which will divide and dehumanise Victorians. 

For the general public distracted by the ritual reading of the COVID-19 cases the appointment might have passed them by.  Just as in February when the law that created the position was up for debate the Victorian Coalition was fawning over the cash for containers scheme.  This radical law was rushed through parliament without opposition or comment, except for the singular valiant effort of David Limbrick and the Liberal Democrats.

The job of this new Commissioner is to enforce the Gender Equality Act.  This law socially engineers the bureaucracy by imposing a new duty to "promote gender equality".  Come next March, more than 300 public bodies from councils to universities will be compelled to compile a "Gender Equality Action Plan" detailing how they will achieve equal gender representation in the organisation.  The legislation even allows the Commissioner to publicly name and shame non-compliment organisations.

But what's worse is that the Gender Equality Act does not even deserve its name as it promotes neither gender, nor equality, but intersectional equity.

Intersectionality is defined in the Webster dictionary as the "cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect".  For example, intersectional theory would say that a woman is more oppressed than a man, but a black woman is more oppressed than a white woman.

The law introduces this concept by explaining that "gender inequality may be compounded by other forms of disadvantage".  The effect of this wording is that all Victorian public bodies must now review and amend their policies, programs and services not just for how they affect women but also consider "Aboriginality, age, disability, ethnicity, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation and other attributes". 

Moreover, the law defines equality as "equality of rights, opportunities, responsibilities and outcomes between persons of different genders".   This is not equality but equity.

Equality requires that people are treated the same, and are given the same opportunities to use their talents and succeed.  Where equality of opportunity is afforded to people the outcomes are based on the aspirations and talents of individuals.

Equity, by contrast, requires that people are treated differently in order to achieve equal outcomes (this is also known as positive discrimination).  Practically this means proportionate gender representation in everything from schools to garbage collectors.

Positive discrimination often reflects poorly on the very group it is trying to advance.  It can result in people pushed into positions they are not yet prepared for, or, assumptions that people are only hired to fill a quota. 

More importantly, positive discrimination is dehumanising.  No one wants to be a quota or to be told they can't succeed without special treatment.

All this is the result of the deeper problem referred to as identity politics which is the formation of political alliances based on group characteristics rather than appeals to people as individuals.

Treating groups as monolithic is to deny individuality, qualities, experience, and freedom of choice.  It drives a wedge between different groups when there is far more to unite them as Australians, such as by drawing on shared culture, heritage, and values.

These divisive ideas and concepts will not be quarantined to the Victorian public service.  They will metastasize out of the bureaucracy and into every nook and cranny of society.  Engage Victoria (whose role is to conduct public consultations on legislation) excitedly describes the law as a "once in a generation reform opportunity to influence policy shifts, social norms, cultural expectations and attitudes across Victoria … Australia and internationally". 

The new Commissioner will be nothing less than the legal enforcer of radical and divisive identity politics.  Victorian public servants will become quotas and targets based on immutable characterises like sex and race, rather than individuals with different qualities, experience, and desires.

If the inept response to the coronavirus has shown anything, it is that Victorian's need a practical and capable public service.  The last thing they need is more ideological positions like a Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner.

The Danger Of Following The Experts

People should be wary of politicians justifying their actions in terms of "following the experts".  Victorians are learning that lesson in the most brutal way possible.

Everything the Victorian government has done has been rationalised as following "science and data and doctors" (yes, that's a direct quote).  It's clear many Victorians, at least initially, took that assertion on face value.  But Daniel Andrews' relentless referral to "the advice of experts" is cynical market-researched banality.

Firstly, it implies all experts believe the same thing.  That there is one approach put forward by the experts and the government is following it.  But academics and experts in all fields rightly spend their careers arguing with each other.  The absence of consensus was made clear a couple of weeks ago when all manner of experts lined up to criticise the Andrews government's "roadmap".

There's clearly no expert consensus to the COVID-19 pandemic and there never was.  The fact that different jurisdictions in Australia and around the world took different approaches should've put paid to the consensus fairy tale months ago.  Indeed far from being an exemplar of the expert consensus, in instituting the longest lockdown in the developed world, Victoria is an outlier.

When Andrews, or any other politician, says they are following the advice of experts, they mean they are following the advice of the experts that endorse their particular policy prescriptions.

Secondly, believe it or not, politicians bend the truth.  Justifying policy as following expert advice is a sublime political tool, particularly during a pandemic when people are frightened.  Victoria's grotesque curfew is a prime example.  Like everything else, it was justified by the Premier as following the advice of experts.  Earlier this month he was shamefully forced to admit "that's a decision I've made" after the Chief Health Officer and police commissioner said it had nothing to do with them.

Thirdly, many people don't realise experts frequently get things wrong.  In 1968 one of the world's most prominent biologists Robert Ehrlich wrongly predicted the "population bomb" would lead to 65 million Americans starving to death in the 1980s.  The American Psychiatric Association considered being gay a mental disorder until the 1970s.

These positions seem ridiculous now, but they were once cutting-edge expert advice.  It is sensible to assume that some of the positions modern society holds as indisputable fact will in the not-too-distant future be considered equally ridiculous.

Closer to home, modelling from the federal Department of Health from April reported that with isolation, quarantine, and social isolation, the number of Australians requiring intensive care while infected with coronavirus would peak at around 5,000.  Fortunately, it peaked at around 100.

And of course, we were told masks weren't necessary — until suddenly they were.

This isn't because experts are stupid or lying.  The fact is, it's really, really difficult to predict the outcome of unbelievably complicated public policy issues.  Which is all the more reason to not treat expert advice as gospel.

Finally, and most importantly, the notion that we could chart our way through this via the advice of experts alone was always simply the abrogation of moral responsibility on behalf of our political leaders.  The COVID-19 pandemic has required political leaders to make admittedly excruciating moral trade-offs.  Whilst experts play a valuable role in informing these decisions, they can't make them for us.

As far as I know, there isn't a peer-reviewed journal article in Lancet telling us to place the wellbeing of adults ahead of the wellbeing of children.  Yet that is what we've done.  Or that movie stars and footballers should be granted exemptions to rules before people hoping to visit dying relatives.

These are moral trade-offs.  And any time anyone's tried to talk about them it's firstly disgracefully been implied that they don't care about people dying.  And secondly, politicians have gutlessly responded that they are just "following the experts".

As government encroaches ever more into our lives and public policy becomes more complicated, people need to be awake to the fact that expert advice is being weaponised in politics more than ever ― from climate change to public health to the economy.  Whilst expert advice can be useful and help us make decisions, it is only advice.  In a democracy, the final call on public policy matters ― and difficult moral trade-offs — is made by us.

Victorians have paid an incredible price for allowing politicians to put matters of morality in the hands of experts.  Let's never let this happen again.

Getting It All Arts-About

At a time when Australia has fallen into its first recession in 30 years, you would hope that the Federal government would be spending the public's money wisely and exercising some vigilance on the behalf of the Australian taxpayer.

Unfortunately, this does not appear to be happening.  The Australia Council for the Arts is the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body.  It says its focus increasing the visibility of Australia's vibrant arts and culture, and recognising the evolving way that Australians make and experience art.

Since April, the Australia Council for the Arts has handed out over $7 million in taxpayers' money to 1,101 individuals and organisations under a new grant scheme called "The 2020 Resilience Fund" in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Council, the new fund is "designed to provide emergency relief to support the livelihoods, practice and operations of Australian artists, groups and organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic".

It goes on to explain that although "the arts and cultural industries, along with all Australians and communities around the world, have experienced incomparable disruption from the impacts of COVID-19, we have never lost sight of the enormous public value of the arts for all Australians".

It seems however, that the Australia Council for the Arts has well and truly lost sight of what is of value to Australians, and what is not.

Take Sydney-based artist Julie Vulcan for example who has been awarded a generous $10,000.  In one of her recent "performance instillations" called "DarkBody", Vulcan inveigled gallery visitors to lie down next three giant mounds she had made from a combination of mushrooms and dirt, and then proceeded to cover their eyes with bags of soil so that they could experience "the daily activities enacted in the dark around us, are an intricate ecology that are essential to our ongoing-ness within a multi-species world".

In another work called "Taking the Mickey Bliss" Vulcan spent two nights in a glass cube in order to make a statement about "current political mileage built around conservative ideologies, are vexed problems for artists and free thinkers at large".  Taking the mickey indeed.

Giselle Stanborough, another Sydney-based artist who, in her own words, is "trapped as a digital apparition at the bottom of the well" has been given $2000 which she might use to create multi-platform artwork to raise questions "about the colonisation of our social activities by large corporations and the way social media and dating apps are changing our intimate relationships".

In the meantime, Mudgee-based feminist weaver, Kelly Leonard, who claims she has shunned traditional galleries for the great outdoors, was awarded $10,000.  Leonard makes giants scarves and stitched texts which she places in various bush locations to "deliver messages" about coal mining and climate change.

In Victoria, $10,000 has been awarded to artist Claire Bridge who describes herself as "Queer Feminist interdisciplinary artist of Anglo-Indian and culturally Deaf Australian" and whose "work responds to issues of ancestral transmissions, gendered violence, intergenerational trauma and the confluence of these concerns with the environment and queer ecologies".

Meanwhile, down in Tasmanian artist Willoh S. Weiland is "concerned with creating epic impossible ideas and trying to fulfil them, working with non-artists, the possibilities of liveness and destroying the white male patriarchy".  She might use some of the $10,000 awarded to her by the Council to continue to "explore the relationship between art and infinity by sending artworks into outer space".

If artists feel that they need to express their disdain for conservative ideologies by sitting in a cube, smash the patriarchy by sending things into outer space, or use needlework to protest about coal mining they are perfectly free to do so.  However, on no account should the hard-working taxpayer account be picking up the bill for them to do it.  Not by any stretch of the imagination can these projects be deemed necessary for emergency funding in the middle of a pandemic.

Worse still, some of the recipients are not even in Australia, with $72K going to artists who are living in the US, the UK and Europe.

The very existence of the "Resilience Fund", through which millions of dollars have been siphoned from the taxpayer by the federal government to fund an array of nonsensical and quite frankly, risible projects, shows that we now live in a divided nation.

There are currently 1 million Australians unemployed and approximately 1.7 million jobs are at risk of being lost over the next three months due to the lockdown restrictions which remain in place across Australia.  We have millions of small businesses in Australia which desperately trying to stay afloat, with people losing everything, yet we are funding "artists" to literally send works into outer space.

This is both wrong and immoral.

In 2015, the Abbott government cut funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and diverted around $105 million to a new fund which saw grants decided by the federal Arts Minister.  This meant that a democratically elected government could have more say about what was funded, rather than handing out a blank cheque for this nonsense.

Unfortunately, the Turnbull government returned the funding to the Council, which is now run at arms' length by the arts community elite, which because of the "peer" review process, means that public money is being dished out by the few to fund political and identity politics obsession.

Australia is facing an economic crisis of epic proportions.  This is no time for mainstream Australians to be paying for self-indulgent and ludicrous projects which will do nothing to benefit them in any way whatsoever.

Covid Totalitarianism

The actions of Victoria Police in the egregious arrest of Ballarat mother Zoe Buhler for posting about an anti-lockdown protest on social media is a graphic representation of Victoria's slide into totalitarianism during the era of COVID-19.

In scenes that have gone global earlier this month, three police officers — intimidatingly clad in face masks and black "uniforms" — served a search warrant on Buhler, seized her mobile devices and accused the visibly pregnant mother of the offence of incitement.  This was in relation to a Facebook post made and shared by Buhler proposing to protest Victoria's severe public health orders, an act she later admitted she thought was legal in the marginally less restricted Ballarat.

Fortunately, Buhler had the foresight to record what the Police were doing.  As the footage shows, Buhler and her husband offer to delete the post, but in a stunning display of brutishness, the officers put Buhler in handcuffs and took her into custody.  At least one of the officers bothered enough to cancel an ultrasound appointment Buhler had booked that day.

Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius defended the police action, only going so far as to say that the "optics of arresting someone who is pregnant is terrible".  The overzealous behaviour of Victoria Police is not just bad "optics", it is feeding a growing perception that the emergency orders has given licence to the authorities to exercise their powers in a disproportionate and borderline-abusive way.

Potentially even worse is that this may be entirely without justification or valid legal basis.  In order to make an arrest without a warrant, the Victorian Crimes Act requires a police officer to reasonably believe that a person has committed an indictable offence.  But Victoria Police has seemingly not even raised a prima facie case that an incitement offence has even taken place.

An incitement offence has two elements:  the first is that a person must have done an inciting act.  Secondly, another person must have been incited by the first person to do something in line with the first person's intention.  There appears to be no suggestion that any person was incited to breach the directions.  An incitement cannot merely be made to the public at large.  Incitement is a serious criminal offence and a recorded conviction is a permanent stain on a person's reputation.  The threshold for establishing that an incitement offence occurred must go beyond whether the Police consider that someone, somewhere might have been incited to do something.

A second issue goes towards whether the government has successfully made protests a crime.  A person can only be guilty of incitement if another person is incited to commit a crime — but the enabling legislation is ambiguous on whether a breach of the Chief Health Officer's Stay at Home Directions is a criminal offence.

Laws that prevent or punish public harms are usually administrative in nature and incur civil penalties, whereas direct harms to another person or specified people are more likely categorised as crimes.  The emergency orders are fundamentally administrative in nature and should only incur civil penalties, rather than criminal penalties.  A compelling reason for this is that a bureaucrat acting alone should not have the power to create new crimes, especially when this can leave consequences that last long after the emergency period has expired in the form of a permanent entry in a person's criminal record.

The above questions may be resolved in either Buhler or Victoria Police's favour, but unresolved will be the shameful reality of the disproportionate and arbitrary enforcement of the directions.  In June Victoria Police refused to enforce the directions against a protest which actually took place in the Melbourne CBD.  Legal advice I obtained in August argued that the decision from Victoria Police to refuse to enforce the directions against any of the 10,000 Black Lives Matters protesters was a potentially unlawful exercise of police discretion.

But having made that decision, it should have then enforced the Directions with consistency and dealt liberally with prospective protesters.  Instead, it completely changed course:  where it once gave free rein to organised left-wing activist protesters to march through Melbourne under Stage 3 restrictions, it now charges into the homes of Victorians living under Stage 3 restrictions in country Victoria who express an objection to the severe social and economic restrictions.

Extraordinarily, the Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton told ABC Radio on Thursday morning that Victoria Police made the decision not to enforce the directions against BLM protesters on the basis that it was likely to become violent.  "We had around the world cities that were burning, we had protests that were violent, we had people being injured, we had property being damaged, places being looted, and absolute mayhem in many societies around the world … We had significant concerns that we would have that type of mayhem in Melbourne."

It seems in Victoria only one kind of protest is allowed.  We had a taste of this in 2018, when the event organisers of Milo Yiannopoulos' speaking tour were charged by Victoria Police for the costs of policing the violence-marred protests that were carried out by Milo's radical left opponents.  And when it comes to the Black Lives Matter protests exploding into social unrest all over the world, Victoria Police not only let it happen but gave it their support.  Assistant Commissioner Russell Barrett declared in a media release on 11 June ― a week after the Black Lives Matter protest took place ― that it was "a cause that is more important than ever and one that is personally close to my heart".

The dishonest, inconsistent, and disproportionate style of police and political leadership in Victoria is an issue that goes beyond the temporary enforcement of COVID-19 rules.  Policing is a fundamental pillar of free societies.  Law and social order need to be enforced, but this is not a blank cheque to throw proportionality out the window, trump up criminal charges, or choose who the law applies to.  These are the characteristics of an unfree society that has rejected the rule of law, and sadly, now describe Australia's second-largest state.

The Rise Of The Bureaucrats

Victorians seem to have accepted the need for their extended Covid lockdown, which has been the longest and harshest anywhere in the developed world.  A Roy Morgan poll conducted by SMS across 8-9 September found continuing majority support for the curfew and movement restrictions.  Premier Daniel Andrews enjoys a 70 per cent approval rating.  Leaked internal polls from the opposition and leadership rumours last week have so far amounted to nothing.  Overall, the government has enjoyed remarkable support.

Yet with a growing mental health crisis and an economic depression, you might have thought that the lockdown would be more controversial ― especially given that this disaster is largely a product of the Victorian government's incompetence, with 99 per cent of second-wave Covid cases being traceable to the quarantine hotels that it so badly mismanaged.

The support cannot simply be attributed to the high stakes involved.  The virus is no more deadly to Victorians than to anyone else and the outbreak seen in Victoria is less severe than some that have been seen in comparable jurisdictions.  Importantly, the costs of the lockdown can also be denominated in the loss of life and health, with evidence mounting that people are deferring healthcare and mental health issues are spiking.  As noted by a group of more than 500 medical experts in an open letter to the government, other jurisdictions have assessed the trade-off differently and chosen different measures.

Moreover, governments around the country, including the federal government, enjoy high approval ratings in respect of the pandemic, regardless of the measures they have taken.  So it is not just a Victorian phenomenon.  There is something else going on.

One possible explanation is that a growing share of people work in the delivery of services that are provided or tightly controlled by the state.  Over the past two generations, Victoria, like the country as a whole, has experienced structural economic change, with the share of workers in industry declining and the service sector rising.  This is sometimes called a shift toward a "knowledge economy".  However, the economy's new jobs are overwhelmingly in healthcare, social assistance, education, and public administration, rather than in the private, productive economy.

Since 1984, when ABS records begin, 27 per cent of new jobs in Victoria have been in knowledge economy fields, broadly defined, like professional services and finance.  40 per cent of new jobs have been in government-dominated services.  28 per cent of all jobs in Victoria are in these services.

Given how many of the professional services exist to ensure compliance with government regulation, it is clear the knowledge economy is really a bureaucracy economy.

The work of a large segment of the population mostly entails developing and implementing government policy, which they are accustomed to seeing as inherently reasonable.  What they ― and we ― are told is that the test for reasonableness in policy is that it is created by a certain procedure.  As long as the right people are consulted and the policy bears the correct stamp, the result is akin to science and therefore beyond debate.

Moreover, to this bureaucratic class, policy is reasonable because it is created by people like them.  Having passed through various levels of formal education and been raised to believe that the collection of credentials is the mark of reasonableness and intelligence, this class of people suffers little self-doubt.

One might even speculate that the possibility a policy or a person could somehow be deficient in reason in spite of procedure is simply too horrific for the bureaucratic class to contemplate.  Were it proven to be the case that Victoria's lockdown policy has been unreasonable, it might strike at their very senses of self.

In any event, it is clear that the bureaucratic class has a narrow view of policymaking and an instinctive deference to government policy.  It is narrow because technical expertise does not translate across domains.  The lockdown, for example, is supposedly a public health policy and therefore a product of public health expertise.  It has been ruinous for the economy, but that reality lies outside the purview of the technocrats in charge.  Worse, this deference is not even to expertise as such ― just ask those 500 experts whose pleas went unheeded.  It is deference to what is merely official.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the opposition to the lockdown that does exist tends to come from people who live in the other economy:  small businesses, independent contractors and young and casual workers.  These people still live by results and not just by procedures, and the results of the lockdown they see in their own lives are grim:  shuttered businesses, shattered dreams and broken homes.  In normal times, they have little invested in the reasonableness of regulation and so now they can see the incompetence and dishonesty of the government for what it is.

This yeoman class lacks representation.  It has been notable, and predictable, that the trade union movement has thrown its weight behind the lockdown.  It now only represents the bureaucrats.  But neither side of politics seems entirely comfortable speaking for the interests of mainstream Australians in the private economy and the values that guide them, almost certainly because, for the politicians as for the economy as a whole, professionalisation has mostly meant bureaucratisation.  Throughout the pandemic, politicians have seemed to hide behind their public health officials, but the truth may be worse.  It might simply be unthinkable to them that the bureaucracy they oversee could ever be wrong.

The cultural force exerted by the rise of the bureaucratic class is most visible in Victoria because the gap between the government's support and performance is so large and so galling.  But if it is right that deference to expert rule is, in part, a product of the restructuring of the economy towards bureaucracy, then note well that the same dynamic exists across the country.  All else being equal, other states will suffer the loss of their way of life just as gladly as Victorians, so long as the right people in white coats tell them it is necessary to do so.

Australia's Violent Enforcement Of Lockdowns Sparks Memories of the Eureka Rebellion

2020 is looking eerily similar to 1854 for the people of Victoria, Australia's second most populous state.  This footage reveals a little of the current scene, with Aussies protesting against draconian lockdowns, and police in riot gear arresting them in large numbers.  More on this below.

EUREKA THEN

First let us wind the clock back 170 years ... Australia is not yet an independent nation, Victoria is still a British colony.  Established as penal colonies for convicts under the guard of British soldiers, the Australian settlements were government projects from the outset.  Historian Robert Hughes described the convict experience as producing "an attitude to authority in which private resentment mingled with ostensible resignation".

But the "gold rush" of the mid-1800s brings in a new aspirational class of workers, including Americans, Irish, British Chartists, and people involved in various European revolutions.  The Australian diggings were notably more lawful and organised than those in California.  People were well behaved and generally unarmed — they just wanted to get on with digging in the hope of striking it rich.  It would take an especially egregious assault by those in power to drive these otherwise lawful men into rebellion.

Government at this time consists of an appointed Governor and a legislative council containing some appointees and some elected members, but voting is mostly limited to landowners — so miners are not represented.  With urban employers and wealthy landowners worried about a labor shortage and an exodus of workers to the diggings, the colonial government comes up with a scheme to coerce the entrepreneurial miners back into structured employment.

Their scheme was a "license fee" similar to a poll tax, initially set at 30 shillings a month.  Miners were forced to pay it whether or not they found gold.  As gold became harder to find, the license fee became increasingly burdensome and resented.

The police were not neutral law enforcers, but would engage in "digger hunts" with accusations of extorting money, taking bribes, and imprisoning people without due process.  Diggers were often asked for their licenses several times in one day.  As testified by Peter Lalor "the diggers were subjected to the most unheard of insults and cruelties in the collection of this tax, being in many instances chained to logs if they could not produce their license".

The miners moreover had no neutral court of law to appeal to if they were unjustly treated — their cases would be heard by the taxation administrators who were themselves "parties to the case".  Miners tried sending delegations to appeal to Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe regarding the fees, but to no avail.

On October 17, 1854, some 5,000 miners gathered over what they felt was an injustice, as a hotel owner and friend of the local magistrate was said to have bribed his way out of a murder charge.  In an unfortunate spill-over of fury, the Eureka Hotel was burned down.  This was the catalyst for what was to become a more organised resistance movement.

On November 11, the Ballarat Reform League was formed under the direction of Chartist John Basson Humffray.  Their demands were the release of three miners charged with the Eureka Hotel fire, and a Chartist inspired program of "no taxation without representation".

But when delegates tried to negotiate with the Victorian government, Governor Charles Hotham felt affronted by the fact that they made "demands" rather than the traditional "petition".  As a rebuff to their apparent insolence, he instead sent 150 soldiers to Ballarat to bolster the police presence.

Then (as now) the situation was moving from petty despotism to organised tyranny.  Authorities threatened to use the riot act to essentially ban gatherings of twelve people or more.

On November 29, as the miners hear Hotham's response, they collectively decide to burn their licenses in outright defiance.  The police respond with an even more aggressive "digger hunt" the next morning.  From this point, to use an Australian expression, it was on.

The land we now know as Australia had previously seen a coup d'etat by the military, and scattered uprisings by Aborigines, Convicts, and Outlaws, which had all been swiftly quelled by those in power.  There had never been a George Washington-type character or a popular uprising.  But on November 30 that year, the miners at Ballarat came the closest.

Led by Irish immigrant Peter Lalor the miners hoisted their own Southern Cross flag and made a pledge:  "We swear by the Southern Cross, to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties".

With Lalor elected as a pseudo-military leader, the miners built a "stockade" (a crude fort) and started engaging in military drills.  But not for long.  Almost immediately, on Sunday December 3 (when the predominantly Catholic Irish would be at Mass) government troops attacked and quickly obliterated their makeshift fort, killing 22 diggers and five soldiers.

The police arrested and detained 113 of the miners while many others went into hiding.  Eventually 13 were taken to Melbourne to stand trial for high treason, including John Joseph — an African American man from Baltimore.  The trials were held in the capital rather than Ballarat to avoid any local attachments.

THE REBELS WIN PUBLIC SYMPATHY

The miners must have known that they never stood a chance militarily.  But the real battleground, both then and now, lay with public opinion.  People in the capital were initially fearful of a full-blown rebellion, but news of the government's heavy-handedness and of the miners' courageous stand against such brutal treatment, gradually started to win the sympathy of the general public.

Large crowds would gather outside courtrooms, with juries frequently taking less than an hour to throw out the case.  Given that the accused probably were guilty of what they were charged with, it was a form of jury nullification of unjust laws.  Anybody interested from a legal point of view can read about the trials here.

In the end, the accused were released and a general amnesty declared for those still in hiding, including Lalor.  The license fee was removed, replaced by an export duty and a nominal £1 per year miner's right.  Half the police on the goldfields were sacked and one warden replaced the multitude of gold commissioners.

The Victorian Legislative Council was expanded to include eight members elected by diggers who held a miner's right.  One of these elected members was Peter Lalor who had survived the stockade as an amputee after being shot in the shoulder.

Former Justice of the High Court Michael Kirby states:

Eureka stands as a warning to indifferent politicians, judges and other officials.  In the ultimate, the law is not obeyed because it is made in this or that way or even because it is declared in courts of the highest authority.  In the end it depends upon the community's acceptance of it.

EUREKA NOW

This brings us to the present day.

At time of writing, the state of Victoria is facing perhaps the developed world's most oppressive and mean-spirited overreaction from the government in response the COVID virus.  Police in riot gear are forcefully clearing out farmers markets, harassing elderly women for sitting on a park bench, snatching infants in strollers from fathers, and fining people for catching a bus without a "work permit".  In the modern town of Ballarat, a pregnant woman in her pajamas is handcuffed and arrested in her own home over a Facebook post promoting a peaceful protest, in a town not even under the severest level of lockdown.  She was charged with "incitement" similar to a terrorism charge, and could face 15 years in jail.  People are being threatened with fines for merely "liking" a Facebook post.

Meanwhile parliament has voted to suspend itself, giving dictatorial powers to the Premier under a so called "state of emergency".  The people are under an 9:00 p.m. curfew, and are only allowed out of their homes to exercise for two hours a day in their local neighbouhood.  Comparisons to dystopian novels can sound trite, but are fitting in this case.

Readers might be thinking that "the virus" must be pretty bad in Victoria to elicit such an authoritarian response.  Guess again.  At time of writing there are 12 people in ICU in the entire state — check the latest figures here if you like.  What makes Victoria different is the impossible threshold set by the Premier — as though viruses can be made to obey human laws.

The Premier has iterated that the lockdowns will remain in place until there are no new cases for 14 consecutive days.  The number of new COVID cases is reported every day almost like a taunt to the public, while every other statistic — like suicides, business closures, bankruptcies, cancelled weddings, undiagnosed cancers, lonely deaths from other causes, etc, etc, is ignored.  It is zero tolerance for a virus, or innocent people will be punished in countless other ways in perpetuity.

This excessive level of restriction goes against the advice of doctors, epidemiologists, lawyers, legal experts, the World Health Organisation, and even Federal government medical officers.  The modelling that provoked it has been shown to be wrong.  Public policy experts have made the seemingly obvious point that a pandemic requires different responses from different sections of the public using dispersed knowledge, so any "one rule for all" response is doomed to fail.

And since any reported case means prolonged lockdown and suffering for everybody, people are increasingly reluctant to report infections or admit to having left their homes.  As a result, contact tracing is failing in Victoria, while working well in other states.

Of course, the Premier has his paid staff of experts who naturally say that the emperor has clothes on this.  But even his own chief medical officer backed away from the Premier's most excessive dictates, leaving him grasping for scapegoats.  Apparently people will only sell so much of their soul.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote:  "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive … those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience".  Perhaps the Premier really believes he is doing good by doing evil.  Or perhaps he is just doubling down on past mistakes to save face.  But with so little intellectual support, it is hard to see this as anything other than a ruthless social experiment to see just how compliant Australian people can be.

SO WHERE DOES THE PUBLIC STAND?

Politics always divides and this present case is no exception.  Those supporting the Premier are generally those with a more comfortable work-from-home existence.  The "pajama class panickers" as they are sometimes called, just want a strong leader to "do something" that seems like it might work, even if it doesn't, having no concept of the cost — since the cost of their perceived protection generally falls onto others.

Worse, there are some who, Gillette ads notwithstanding, seem to think that violence against women is totally fine when it is carried out by "law enforcers".  They cheer and gloat when people are arrested for simply living their life, because it apparently "serves them right".  Some elements of the media are quick to smear any protesters as crazy conspiracy theorists, while the brother of the pregnant Facebooker mentioned above has reportedly received death threats for trying to raise funds for her legal defense.

But on the brighter side, just as the general public turned against the excesses of the police state in 1854, the same is happening today.  When the government, in the name of saving lives, criminalises actually living your life, people start to realise what libertarians have been saying for a long time:  the state is them not us.  The state is not on the side of peaceful individuals that make up society, and there is no aspect of your life that they won't step on to show you who is boss.

States can usually rely on corporate CEOs and celebrities to tow the politically correct line — but thankfully not in this case.  Business leaders are pointing out absurdities — like how municipal workers can work in groups but private contractors are prohibited from even mowing a lawn by themselves.

Those with a public voice are lambasting the Premier, like this football player whose father (also a famous footballer) died alone, saying "I lost my 78-year-old father, Premier … He wasn't dying from this, he was dying from the isolation and the loneliness".  The general public is realising it has a voice, that the medical experts (besides courtiers on the Premier's payroll) are on our side, and the tyrants in charge are increasingly fumbling for excuses.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

It would be nice if the police could have some backbone at this time — to say to their bosses, "We are not doing this anymore.  We refuse to be degraded in this way, being sent to war against the people we are supposed to protect".  But that is unlikely.

More realistically, in the Australian political system, State Premiers can be ousted within days without parliament even sitting, if their own party room turns against them and calls a "spill".  A deputy leader or cabinet minister who was "fully on board" with the agenda five minutes ago, can suddenly come out as being diametrically opposed to it, and take the top job.

That is the most plausible way out of this nightmare for the people of Victoria.  Viruses are not going away, but Premiers can be sent packing pretty easily.  The backbenchers of the ruling Labor party need to fear for their own re-election more than they crave the favour of their failed leader.

All that is required is enough of a groundswell of support for peaceful coexistence with sensible, contextually appropriate safeguards, and the removal of support for bullies and thugs.  Resolute Victorians stood up to tyranny at least once before, and will stand up once again.

The Ethical Collapse Of Victoria's Government

On Wednesday I said on my Podcast that in Victoria the key democratic institutions are being destroyed by the State's Premier, Daniel Andrews, in his myopic pursuit of virus eradication.  On the podcast I outlined the punitive and counter-productive measures in the "Stage 4" lockdown enforced under a State of Emergency and virtual martial law.  I said:

"The institutions that have served us so well, one by one have been cast aside:  Parliament's been cast aside, Cabinet Government's being cast aside, free speech has been cast aside (and also) civil liberties.  All the institutions that were patiently built up over centuries have just been thrown away.  And it's … not only is that galling in its own right ― I mean, we should maintain all of those institutions, even if they were the most inefficient and stupid way to manage on the earth because they have legitimacy as elements of liberal democracy ― but we've cast all them aside.

"And what we actually have is not better decision making it's dysfunctional decision making.  This is exactly what we saw in Soviet Russia and China.  The more you centralise power, the harder it is for actual information about what's actually going on to reach the top."

While I have over the past few months considered various (non-exclusive) explanations for the Premier's behaviour (socialist, statist, centralising, Jacobin, Machiavellian, cognitively limited), I realised today its single best fit is with the model of "Ethical Collapse" originally outlined by Marianne M. Jennings in her 2006 book.

Her concern was corporations such as Enron, but the model fits governments just as well.

Her seven signs that ethical collapse is imminent can be summarised as:

• Pressure to maintain numbers
• Fear and silence
• Young 'uns around a bigger-than-life CEO
• A weak board
• Conflicts of interest
• Innovation like no other;  and
• Goodness in some areas atoning for evil in others.

In Victoria there is evidence of deep concerns relating to all seven of these dimensions.

The numbers the Premier recounts in his daily interminable and point press conferences are those of "cases" and deaths.  His key aim is for zero cases over a 14 day period in November, something not achieved anywhere in the world.

"Fear and silence" is maintained by ruthless overlordship of his own party, policing of social media by an army of DanBots and the organised #IStandWithDan campaign, and a complicit media which has benefited from the propaganda campaign by dint of being (for the first time in decades) the principal conduit of information to the public (the Premier has addressed a captive Parliamentary Press Gallery in a windowless room for more than 60 days in a row, working very hard to not answer any undesired questions).  The opposition is silenced by not having access to the public and televised forum of Parliament ― particularly the lower house (closed for "health reasons") ― and people are being pre-emptively arrested for the crime not just of protesting the measures but of organising and promoting said protests on Facebook.

As Chip Le Grand at The Age has described, the Pandemic has just exacerbated Andrews' tendency to centralise power into his own hands, bypassing the norms of Cabinet Government and destroying accountability.  He relies on (apparently) more than 100 of his own staff, who we can presume to mostly "young" and suitably subservient.  There is no feasible sanction from the public, which doesn't get to vote again until November 2022.

While the impacts of punitive lockdowns are felt almost entirely in the private sector, the Premier's electoral power base is in the public sector and those reliant upon it.  In the June Quarter in Victoria wages paid to private workers fell by $1.91 billion, while those paid to the public sector increased by $88 million.  If you want evidence of a conflict of interest, it is that 2% pay rise for public servants went ahead as scheduled, in the middle of the biggest recession we've ever had.  As I have said, decision-makers "have not incurred any of the costs of their reckless lockdown measures, yet they decide when and how the private sector workforce can go back to work".

There is great pressure to innovate as Victoria has followed the lead of so many countries by attempting ― for the time in human history ― to defeat a virus through lockdowns.  Failures in Hotel Quarantine and contact tracing indicate the State's capacity has not kept pace with the leader's desire to innovate.

Finally, there is the moral dimension:  "goodness in some areas atoning for evil in others".  Clearly the Premier is convinced that all measures taken (and maybe some more under consideration) can be justified for the good of preventing the deaths otherwise recounted in his grim daily toll (see point 1, above).  The most charitable explanation I have read is that he is personally devastated by the deaths of the Aged in nursing homes ― the tally of which he reads out daily ― and he is determined that it end.

This, however, blinds him to the moral and ethical problems with the measures he's ordered, and even to other deaths that will pile up but which are counted in ledgers outside his narrow system (suicides, poverty-related conditions, deferment of health-care etc).  Needless to say speculation about comorbidities and related issues regarding the deceased are verboten.

The point is that while all of my original criticisms (socialist, statist, centralising, Jacobin, Machiavellian, cognitively limited) could well be valid, I accept they may be less persuasive to those who do not share my ideological lens.  It is true I am pre-disposed to freedom, the private sector, and Parliamentary democracy, and this influences my perceptions, but I understand others may put a greater premium on other institutions and values.

"And when rules get replaced, what you're being asked to place your faith in is the ruler.

But once you understand that we are approaching Ethical Collapse, I hope even those who don't share my starting point see what's at stake.  It is not just that the path taken is wrong-headed (though it is), it is that end of the process the State will be hollowed out of its most important institutions and values, and  there will be nothing in their place.  In place of the institutions being destroyed all we have is the Leader, the Great Helmsman, who makes all the decisions and in whom all are called upon to provide absolute faith.  As I said on the Podcast:

I would say that generally all rules have an element of faith in them … you abide by a rule because you have faith that the longer term consequences of you and everyone else abiding by this rule will work out for the better ― that's generally what we tell ourselves.

And when rules get replaced, what you're being asked to place your faith in is the ruler.  And that is a very precarious situation.  It's much less stable over time than people having faith in rules, because when the performance of the ruler starts to diminish and people's confidence in him starts to diminish, then you end up you're on the verge of disorder.  And I would say, that's what we are on the verge of here in Victoria.

We should be concerned not just at the economic wasteland being created in Victoria, but also its flattened moral and ethical landscape.

Danandrewstan And The Death Of Melbourne, Explained

It was the image that shocked Australia and soon went global.  A pregnant woman, handcuffed in her own kitchen, in front of her children, as police officers seized every computer, tablet and cell phone in the house before frog-marching her off to the station.

It's the treatment that Australians are used to seeing meted out to drug traffickers, suspected terrorists and child pornography rings.  But in Zoe Lee Buhler's case, her "crime" was a Facebook post.

Zoe had tried to organise a protest against coronavirus restrictions in place in the state of Victoria.  For this, she was charged with "incitement", and now faces a sentence of up to 15 years.  She has been released on bail, and will go to court in January.

The most remarkable thing, though, is it's taken until now for some sort of protest movement to emerge.  Melbourne — Victoria's capital city — has been under some form of lockdown since March.  When the coronavirus first hit, the premiers governing Australia's eight states and territories descended into a kind of unspoken competition to see who could take the "toughest action" against the virus — that is, which leader could close the most businesses, destroy the most jobs, and stifle the most liberties in the name of being seen to be "doing something" about the virus.

It was a contest that hard-left Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews won by a mile.  Almost six months later, Melbourne is still under what is by far the strictest lockdown in Australia, and probably the world.  At time of writing, a city-wide curfew applies between 8 pm and 5 am.  Melburnians are permitted to leave the house for exercise for an hour a day and in groups of no more than two.  You're allowed to go out to get food as well, but only by yourself, and only once a day.  The increasingly few people with jobs must carry a government-issued permit indicating that they're allowed to go to work — and even then only if your job is deemed "essential".

If this shatters your idea of Australia as a rugged, relaxed, irreverent wonderland, then I apologise.  That Australia died long ago, to the extent it ever really existed at all.  Australia has no First Amendment, and its political culture is closer to continental Europe than the U.S.  Fundamental freedoms have been largely left to conventions inherited from the British.  They have proved fragile, though nobody ever imagined that they would be this fragile.

The fact that Melbourne has allowed itself to be decimated in the name of the coronavirus is as predictable as it is heartbreaking.  It's a city a bit like San Francisco or Seattle — A beautiful, vibrant, dynamic metropolis that until now had among the best food, culture and nightlife in the world.  But like America's coastal cities, left-wing politics is a package deal — street art in aid of one asinine cause or another almost becomes part of the scenery.

Daniel Andrews knows this and exploits it.  Somewhere along the way, he picked up the playbook of Democrats who preside over dysfunction, poverty, crime and thinly-veiled corruption, and make up for it all by wheeling out some woke gimmick every so often — almost always involving vast sums of public money.  The coronavirus has given him the best talking point of all:  "The economy versus human life".

It's the recurring theme in Andrews' interminable press conferences — daily sermons that are so theatrical and dishonest they would make Andrew Cuomo blush.  Behind him always, a purple banner with the state government's Orwellian coronavirus slogan, which can also be found plastered on billboards all over the city:  Staying Apart Keeps Us Together.

The media response is — with a few exceptions — fawning and uncritical, but it's the only real check or balance they have:  The state parliament has barely sat since March, and coronavirus restrictions have been made by executive fiat under dubious "emergency powers".

All that said, Andrews' hitherto insurmountable hold on power is slipping.  The lockdown has wrought enough joblessness, business closures and outright despair that people are starting to take notice.  Even in the People's Republic of Victoria, the mood is turning against the man now widely derided as "Chairman Dan".

But in the meantime, Melbourne's lockdowns continue.  Andrews sought an extension for his emergency powers, which the parliament inexplicably gave him.  And over the weekend, he announced a convoluted "roadmap to reopening" which basically means that Melburnians will enter Australia's sweltering summer under house arrest, and will be holding their Christmas dinners via Zoom.

It's a cautionary tale, and then some.  For the sake of a nasty strain of viral pneumonia, Victorians eagerly cashed in their freedoms for the promise of safety.  In so doing, they have turned one of the greatest cities in the world to a dystopian hellscape with no end in sight.

Dan's Debacle Shows Why Democracy Matters

The debacle that is the response of Australia's state governments to the coronavirus pandemic has provoked claims such as "the federation is broken" and "the PM must do something about it".

In Melbourne, at the moment, a much-discussed option (and wistful hope) is that if Daniel Andrews doesn't resign, then somehow he's sacked by either the state's governor or even the prime minister.  The chances of the first eventuality are for the time being close to zero, and for the second two, zero.

Scott Morrison could no more sack Andrews or Annastacia Palaszczuk than the six premiers could sack him ― which is as it should be.

The problem with Australia's system of federalism is not that Canberra doesn't have enough power, it's that it has too much.  If the premiers who have shut their state's borders were to suffer the financial consequences of their decisions, they wouldn't be quite so cavalier about what they're doing.

In the immediate term, the suggestion that Morrison impose financial sanctions on states that don't open their borders or economies is, on the face of it, attractive, but misguided.  Sanctions seldom work and they more often harm the very people they're aimed at helping

Even if there could be some sort of constitutionally valid means of, for example, the federal government not paying unemployment benefits to Victorians as a form of punishment for Andrews, he won't be directly affected.

Nor will any of Victoria's public servants, none of whom has lost their jobs but who all have received pay rises.  Sanctions never hurt the ruling regime ― they hit the common people.  Whether Victorians get a new Commonwealth-funded road or railway shouldn't depend on whether the state's premier acts like a tyrannical autocrat.

RULE BOOK TOSSED ASIDE

In Australia, it's not federalism that's broken;  it's politics.  This, at least in liberal democracies such as Australia, operates according to norms, conventions and customs, nearly all of which have been broken by the coronavirus.  It's not just the economics rule book that has been tossed aside by the pandemic.

Up until March this year, it would have been assumed that in Australia federal and state governments attempting to deal with something even as dangerous as the coronavirus would put in place measures that operated according to the principles of basic human rights.  This hasn't happened.  Education is a basic human right but nonetheless schools were shut to "make a point".

The creation of the national cabinet, comprising the PM and the premiers and chief ministers, was another breakaway from traditional politics.  Cabinets by their nature are not transparent and are not open to public scrutiny.

The national cabinet's deliberations imposing unparalleled restrictions on the civil and economic liberties of Australians are confidential as is the information upon which those deliberations are based.

Political partisanship and point-scoring play a vital role in keeping government power in check.  Australians realise this, which is why they so often vote for a different party federally compared with the state level.

The desire of politicians and the media to create an environment of "national unity" has meant that the traditional models of political scrutiny that occur when a prime minister is of a different party to a premier no longer apply.

Nowhere is the effect of this more obvious than for Victoria.  While it might be true that the Victorian state opposition was initially unduly circumspect in its criticism of how Andrews was managing the crisis, to be fair it's difficult for a state Liberal leader to call for a Labor premier to resign when simultaneously the Liberal prime minister speaks effusively about how effectively he and that premier are working together.

The Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, said in May about Andrews:  "Sure, take a sledgehammer to defeating coronavirus, but why are you taking a sledgehammer also to the state education system?"

If a few more federal Liberal ministers had attempted to hold Andrews to account earlier, the disaster that is Victoria might have been avoided.  Tehan was prescient.

Because since May, Andrews hasn't taken a sledgehammer only to Victoria's schools ― he's taken it to the entire state.

Our Threatening K-Shaped Corona Recession

Australia is emerging from the COVID-19 lockdown measures not as one, but two separate nations comprised of the economic, cultural and political elite embodied in the public sector on one hand, and mainstream Australia embodied in the productive, private sector on the other.

The two Australias have emerged over time.  Before coronavirus arrived in this country, those in the private sector were second-class citizens compared to their public sector counterparts.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2019 average weekly earnings in the public sector were 30% higher than those in the private sector, and while private-sector workers receive superannuation contributions of 9.5%, those in the public sector can look forward to a comfortable retirement with contributions of 15.4% funded by taxpayers.  My research has found that this public sector wage and super premium cost taxpayers $5.7 billion in the 2018-19 financial year.

This divide set the stage for the current recession, Australia's first in almost 30 years.  This is not any ordinary recession;  it is a private sector recession.  The public sector, which contains those responsible for making the decisions to lockdown parts of the economy, has been completely insulated from any negative consequence arising from these decisions.  The private sector, on the other hand, has borne the entire cost of the measures aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Since March, commentators have been searching for the ideal letter to express how the economy will recover from the lockdown-induced economic contraction.  The most optimistic is a "V" shaped recovery, where, after a short sharp contraction, things return to normal.  Another possibility is the "W" shaped recovery, where there is some turbulence provided by a short-lived snapback after the initial contraction and a slower eventual return to normal.  The most dreaded, one might think, is the "L" shaped recovery, where jobs and economic activity are never restored to their pre-pandemic levels.

The search for such a letter is over.  The most accurate way to describe Australia's economic recovery is using the letter "K", where the public sector is on the upward arm and the private sector is on the downward arm.

As shown in my analysis published in August, the public sector has flourished during the lockdown while the private sector has been smashed.  As visibly demonstrated in that analysis, mainstream Australia continues to suffer while public sector workers go unscathed.  According to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, public-sector jobs have increased by 1.9% since 14 March, compared to a 5.4% decrease in the private sector.  This translates into about 15,200 jobs added in the public sector and 650,000 jobs lost in the private sector.

My analysis of ABS data released on 2 September provided more evidence of the "K" shaped recovery:  in the June quarter private sector wages declined by $5.9 billion, while public sector wages increased by $768 million.

Contrary to the condescending refrain that "we are all in this together", few public servants have experienced the economic hardship being inflicted on mainstream Australians.  In fact, 15,200 public servants have been hired since 14 March.  And for each public servant hired, 42 private sector workers have lost their job.

This divide poses a serious threat to Australia's robust, egalitarian liberal democracy.  According to the Australian National University's Australian Election Study, which measures long-term trends in political attitudes and behaviours, 75% of Australian voters in 2019 thought that people in government look after themselves, up from 49% in 1969.  Alarmingly, 41% of voters said that they were not satisfied with democracy, up from 23% in 1969 and a sharp rise from the 14% who thought so in 2007.

Ordinary Australians have been left behind by the disdainful class of public sector elites during the COVID-19 crisis.  The lockdown measures have smashed those in the private sector, and those in the public sector, who decide when and how lockdowns will be eased, have not suffered any negative consequences.

The trend of dissatisfaction with democracy and alienation from the political class will only become more pronounced during the economic recovery, particularly if it continues along its current "K" shaped trajectories.  Everything that underpins the Australian way of life, small business, reward for hard work, and liberal democratic freedom, are in peril if the "K" shaped recovery continues.

Lockdowns Hurt Small Business, Young Australians But Public Servants Flourish

This is not Australia's first recession, nor will not be the last, but it is the first recession caused by deliberate actions taken by government.

Creating a depression-era economy is the expert classes' solution to managing COVID-19.

Shutting down the economy and society through social distancing and travel restrictions was considered the only way to slow the spread of the virus.

The problem is that this man-made recession falls unevenly across Australians.  It is the young, small businesses, the self-employed, and those in the productive, private parts of the economy who are being smashed, while public servants and bureaucrats have not only been sheltered but they have flourished.

My analysis of data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on September 2 estimated that in the June quarter total wages paid to private sector workers dropped by $5.9bn, whereas wages in the public sector rose by $768m.

Every state and territory is divided along these lines.  In NSW, private sector wages fell $1.95bn while public rose $185m.  In Victoria, the split was $1.91bn versus $88m, and in Queensland $1.66bn versus $136m.

In the ACT, which is home to public servants with the biggest snouts in the biggest trough in the nation, public sector wages rose an astonishing $277m.  That accounts for more than a third of the total public sector wage increase while the ACT accounts for less than 2 per cent of Australia's population.

Across the nation more than 22,000 jobs have been added to the public service since lockdowns began in March while more than 572,000 jobs have been destroyed in the private sector.  This means that for every job added in the public sector, 26 have been lost elsewhere.  And yet it is those in the public sector that decide when those in the private sector can return to work.

The divide goes on.

Young Australians have incurred 35 per cent of net job losses, even though they account for 15 per cent of the workforce.  And they will need to pay back the forecast $1 trillion in debt that will be accumulated at the federal level alone over the next three years.

According to the ABS data, 35 per cent of small businesses reported that it would be difficult to meet financial commitments over the next three months, compared with 18 per cent of large businesses.

And a poll undertaken in August found 65 per cent of the self-employed agreed with the statement:  "I have either lost my job, had my hours cut, or had my pay cut, or someone I know has, as a result of the lockdown restrictions".  This compares with 46 per cent of those working for someone else.

But despite this destruction and the inequitable impacts, governments have doubled down with a virus elimination strategy.

In March and April the objective of the lockdowns was to "flatten the curve" to make sure that the hospital and medical systems were not overwhelmed.

The curve was not flattened, it was smashed by mid-April.  Mission accomplished.

But power-hungry premiers, politicians and unelected health bureaucrats weren't going to return the freedoms confiscated on the basis of what we now know are exaggerated claims and highly inaccurate modelling.

Modelling by the federal Department of Health from April infamously reported that under a best-case scenario which included social distancing, travel restrictions and quarantining, a peak of some 5000 Australians would require intensive care while infected with the coronavirus.  The peak was about 100.  They were out by a factor of 50.

Rather than acknowledging this, which presumably would be too embarrassing and prove the credentialled class has no clothes, governments went to virus suppression and then to virus elimination.

But elimination is a false god, worshipped by those such as the Grattan Institute, the ABC and health bureaucrats, whose jobs and livelihoods aren't hanging in the balance.

Zero COVID-19 cases may mean zero jobs, zero freedom, and zero hope.

To get back our jobs, freedoms, democracy and way of life we must learn to live with the virus, not eliminate it.

The Increasing Threat Of Delegated Legislation ― Legislation Put Above The Power Of Parliament

"It's probably a bit unusual for me to be in agreement with Richard Wood," said Labor Senator Kim Carr.  "I have been known to say some nasty things about you."

This utterance occurred during a hearing of the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Delegated Legislation on 27 August, of which Carr is a member.  The Committee is currently inquiring into the exemption of laws from the committee's oversight and scrutiny.

It is a cliché of modern political discourse that it is polarised and petty, characterised by partisan bickering along strict party lines.  Carr himself in 1993 referred to me as "Hitler Youth".  But all that is forgiven and forgotten in this Senate Committee where the battles they are engaged in cut across the party and ideological lines.  In many ways their task is bigger than party politics.

The function of this Senate Committee is to review the regulations and other types of laws that ministers and the bureaucracy are authorised to make, known as delegated legislation.  The parliament delegates this authority but retains the power to scrutinise and disallow these legislative instruments, which is exercised primarily by the Senate Committee.

Reviewing the regulations coming out of the government departments has become a mammoth task given its volume.  My research in June 2019 found that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alone had 44,160 pages of regulation in force.

While the volume of delegated legislation is an issue in and of itself, far more problematic is that increasingly delegated legislation are not even able to be scrutinised or disallowed by the Senate committees.  Carr spoke of his experience of there being an increasing proportion of delegated legislation exempt from disallowance "which suits the senior public servants — in my experience as a former minister".

The absorption of law-making powers away from the elected representative parliament into the various ministerial departments and government agencies is a trend that has been occurring for a long time, but like with many trends, COVID-19 has accelerated it.  In 2019 about 20% of the delegated legislation was exempt from the disallowance, but in 2020 more than 23% of delegated legislation issued in response to the coronavirus has been exempt.

Between 18 March and 11 June, 171 pieces of delegated legislation were created in response to the pandemic, 40 of which have been exempt from democratic oversight in the form of disallowance.  Among these exempt rules are the declaration of biosecurity emergency and subsequent extensions of the emergency period, travel bans, regulation of therapeutic drugs for COVID-19 including Hydroxychloroquine and Salbutamol, regulating cruise ships (remember the Ruby Princess debacle), restricting the trade of airport shops, regulations on the possession of equipment to limit the spread of COVID-19, implementation and regulation of the COVIDSafe app, and, changes to public sector operations such as pay.

In most cases the exemptions are piecemeal, but in other cases the rules made by agencies, like the Murray Darling Basin Authority, are entirely exempt from scrutiny.  Perversely Ministers can pass regulations exempting entire classes of delegation legislation from oversight.

The transfer of law-making powers to the bureaucracy is a sign of technocratic government.  Instead of the power being held by those people elected, the power to make laws increasingly rest with the pen-pushers in the various departments.

If the trend of the parliament abrogating power to the bureaucracy continues then our democracy is a stake.  If the elected parliament surrenders their law-making power, then casting a vote will become meaningless since we elect will never be able to represent us or change the direction of the country.

The Senate Committee's inquiry may sound technical and wonky but it relates to an important question about Australia's future, not the least of which will be whether we continue to slide into technocracy or whether the parliament will ever reassert itself against the vast machinery of the Canberra bureaucracy.

COVID Dystopia Comes To Melbourne

It was the image that shocked Australia and soon went global.  A pregnant woman, handcuffed in her own kitchen, in front of her children, as police officers seized every computer, tablet and cell phone in the house before frog-marching her off to the station.

It's the treatment that Australians are used to seeing meted out to drug traffickers, suspected terrorists and child pornography rings.  But in Zoe Lee Buhler's case, her "crime" was a Facebook post.

Zoe had tried to organise a protest against coronavirus restrictions in place in the state of Victoria.  For this, she was charged with "incitement", and now faces a sentence of up to 15 years.  She has been released on bail, and will go to court in January.

The most remarkable thing, though, is it's taken until now for some sort of protest movement to emerge.  Melbourne — Victoria's capital city — has been under some form of lockdown since March.  When the coronavirus first hit, the premiers governing Australia's eight states and territories descended into a kind of unspoken competition to see who could take the "toughest action" against the virus — that is, which leader could close the most businesses, destroy the most jobs, and stifle the most liberties in the name of being seen to be "doing something" about the virus.

It was a contest that hard-left Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews won by a mile.  Almost six months later, Melbourne is still under what is by far the strictest lockdown in Australia, and probably the world.  At time of writing, a city-wide curfew applies between 8pm and 5am.  Melburnians are permitted to leave the house for exercise for an hour a day and in groups of no more than two.  You're allowed to go out to get food as well, but only by yourself, and only once a day.  The increasingly few people with jobs must carry a government-issued permit indicating that they're allowed to go to work — and even then only if your job is deemed "essential".

If this shatters your idea of Australia as a rugged, relaxed, irreverent wonderland, then I apologise.  That Australia died long ago, to the extent it ever really existed at all.  Australia has no First Amendment, and its political culture is closer to continental Europe than the U.S.  Fundamental freedoms have been largely left to conventions inherited from the British.  They have proved fragile, though nobody ever imagined that they would be this fragile.

The fact that Melbourne has allowed itself to be decimated in the name of the coronavirus is as predictable as it is heartbreaking.  It's a city a bit like San Francisco or Seattle — A beautiful, vibrant, dynamic metropolis that until now had among the best food, culture and nightlife in the world.  But like America's coastal cities, left-wing politics is a package deal — street art in aid of one asinine cause or another almost becomes part of the scenery.

Daniel Andrews knows this, and exploits it.  Somewhere along the way, he picked up the playbook of Democrats who preside over dysfunction, poverty, crime and thinly-veiled corruption, and make up for it all by wheeling out some woke gimmick every so often — almost always involving vast sums of public money.  The coronavirus has given him the best talking point of all:  "The economy versus human life".

It's the recurring theme in Andrews' interminable press conferences — daily sermons that are so theatrical and dishonest they would make Andrew Cuomo blush.  Behind him always, a purple banner with the state government's Orwellian coronavirus slogan, which can also be found plastered on billboards all over the city:  Staying Apart Keeps Us Together.

The media response is — with a few exceptions — fawning and uncritical, but it's the only real check or balance we have:  The state parliament has barely sat since March, and coronavirus restrictions have been made by executive fiat under dubious "emergency powers".

All that said, Andrews' hitherto insurmountable hold on power is slipping.  The lockdown has wrought enough joblessness, business closures and outright despair that people are starting to take notice.  Even in the People's Republic of Victoria, the mood is turning against the man now widely derided as "Chairman Dan".

But in the meantime, Melbourne's lockdowns continue.  Andrews sought an extension for his emergency powers, which the parliament inexplicably gave him.  And over the weekend, he announced a convoluted "roadmap to reopening" which basically means that Melburnians will enter Australia's sweltering summer under house arrest, and will be holding their Christmas dinners via Zoom.

It's a cautionary tale, and then some.  For the sake of a nasty strain of viral pneumonia, Victorians eagerly cashed in their freedoms for the promise of safety.  In so doing, we have turned one of the greatest cities in the world to a dystopian hellscape with no end in sight.

Australia's Covid Police State

Last week's arrest of Zoe Buhler by Australian police, the video of which swept the world, should terrify every person who believes in liberal democracy.

Buhler, a 28-year-old pregnant mother, was arrested at her home near Ballarat, Victoria, on Wednesday.  She was handcuffed in front of her family, had her computer and phones confiscated, and was led out of her house by the police.

What had she done that was deserving of such heavy-handed treatment?  What had she done that made it worth subjecting her family to the sight of seeing her in handcuffs?

Very little.  She had attempted, through a posting on Facebook, to organise a peaceful anti-lockdown gathering in Ballarat ― a town with just four active cases of coronavirus.

Look at the exact words of Buhler's Facebook post, and ask yourself whether it warrants police intervention:

'PEACEFUL PROTEST.  All social-distancing measures are to be followed so we don't get arrested please.  Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to.  September 5th is FREEDOM DAY!'

Victoria police see those words as criminal activity ― "the planning and encouragement of protest activity".  As a result, Buhler is due to appear in court in January next year.  She could be jailed for up to 15 years.

All for a Facebook post.

The reaction of Australian politicians to Buhler's arrest is even more worrying.  Assistant commissioner Luke Cornelius, one of Victoria's most senior police officers, said he was "absolutely satisfied" with the arrest.  The only thing he regretted was the video, and the "optics" of the arrest of a pregnant woman, which he said were "terrible".  So there you have it:  the only thing Cornelius regrets about the arrest was that the public saw it.

This is an astonishing change of attitude from Cornelius.  Victorians remember in June when he said of the then imminent Black Lives Matter protests that he and the police "absolutely understand the sentiment and the anger that lies behind that and we are very keen to support the community in giving a voice to their concerns".  The authorities promptly allowed over 10,000 Victorians to march in Melbourne without being fined.

It seems it was okay for BLM supporters to voice their concerns, but not for anti-lockdown protesters like Buhler.  The message is clear.  If you are going to protest, it better be for a cause the elites support.

For his part, Victoria premier Daniel Andrews claimed not to have seen the footage of the arrest, even though it was featured on the websites of every paper in Australia, and, among others, in the New York Post, the Daily Mail and on CNN.  But no, the premier of Victoria just missed it.  Other things occupied his mind.  It's not a good look ― he seems unconcerned with the state of democratic society, even as it crumbles around him.

Buhler is not the only person to have been arrested in Victoria in relation to lockdown protests this week.  Another man had his house broken into by police for saying he would go to an anti-lockdown protest.  He was tackled to the ground and handcuffed in his living room.

Victoria is now a police state.  That is the simple and depressing truth of all this.  If the government feels that you are standing in the way of its goals, then your freedoms are forfeited and you will be arrested.

What's more, Victoria's lockdown measures really do need protesting.  If you leave your house after 8pm, you will be fined.  If you stray more than five kilometres from your house, you will be fined.  If you visit your father on Father's Day, you will be fined.  If you go outside with more than one other person for exercise, you will be fined.  And if you protest against any of this, you will be arrested.

Victorians are living in a battered state.  They have been cut off from our friends, our family and our work.  Cut off from so many things that make life worth living ― their culture, their sport, their cafes, their restaurants, their museums, their nightlife.  And they have been bullied by a government that tolerates no opposition to what is going on.

Daniel Andrews speaks of bringing Victoria to a Covid-normal.  That's what they're all adjusting to as well.  Because no Victorian sees the state ever returning to actual normal.