Anthony Albanese’s worthless inquiry into the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has this week delivered a report that tells us nothing we don’t already know. It validates One Nation’s demand for a Royal Commission.
It says human rights were “restricted” (read: violated). It says responses across jurisdictions were “varied” and that this “undermined public confidence and trust.”. It says these “differences were not easily explained, and no rationale was provided,” including “unilateral” state border closures that “lacked consistency and compassion.”.
The report argues for greater transparency in future pandemic responses while noting “economic, social, and mental health and human rights impacts were not always understood or considered” in 2020. Let’s say that again, with feeling: human rights were not considered.
The report—more than 800 pages—was critical of “control measures” implemented by the authorities without sufficient explanation, which “fed the perception that the government did not trust the public to understand or interpret the information correctly and contributed to the decrease in trust.”.
The report admitted that COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other public health restrictions had the biggest negative impact on trust: “The combination of mandatory measures and the perception people had that they were unable to criticise or question decisions and policies has contributed to non-mandated vaccination rates falling to dangerously low levels.”.
It’s nothing that One Nation wasn’t saying during the pandemic itself. That was the time to implement a coordinated, consistent approach. That was the time to act to protect human rights that were being routinely violated by state and territory authorities—not two years after the pandemic, but during the pandemic.
The report doesn’t name the premiers and chief ministers who were responsible for it, all of whom have since moved on except the ACT’s Andrew Barr. The report does nothing to reveal the ‘expert’ health advice that led to the lockdowns and mandates. As we said it would be, the report is essentially worthless, just like the enquiry that preceded it because it would hold no one accountable.
The Albanese government’s response is straight out of the Labor playbook: create another agency, in this case an Australian centre for disease control, at a cost of $251 million. More unelected bureaucrats and health ‘experts’ telling us what to do, funded with yet more taxpayers’ money. There’s no problem that Labor doesn’t think it can fix by spending even more of your money to create a new agency.
Centre for disease control? Why do we get the feeling that really means ‘centre for social and political control’?
Only a comprehensive Royal Commission into the management of the pandemic will have the power to compel the information that Australians have every right to see and hold to account the authorities and state and territory leaders who gleefully trampled all over the rights they had a duty to protect.