Anthony Albanese went to the 2022 election promising a COVID royal commission, but in September last year reneged on his promise, announcing instead a “special commission of inquiry”, which could not compel witnesses, and, more importantly, would be restricted in its terms of reference to only examine the response of the federal government.
Thus, the inquiry will not scrutinise the devastating lockdowns, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates and border closures imposed by state and territory governments.
Moreover, one of the government’s three hand-picked experts to conduct the inquiry, economist Angela Jackson, was a former deputy chief of staff to Labor finance minister Lindsay Tanner – and had previously attracted criticism given her public support for Victoria’s hard lockdowns, thereby raising serious concerns about the inquiry developing into a government protection racket.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby once said, you never set up an inquiry unless you know the outcome.
However, opposition is growing to the Albanese government’s narrow inquiry.
The Australian Human Rights Commission maintains a properly constituted joint federal and state royal commission would be the “best option” to examine Australia’s response comprehensively.
‘The full human cost of the pandemic was substantial and cannot be measured by considering only the direct health and economic impacts,’ Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay wrote in her submission.
Indeed.
Given that government figures parrot the line that “everybody did their best and there was no rulebook”, one of the first things the inquiry should examine is why pre-established pandemic plans which focused on protecting the vulnerable and letting everyone else get on with their lives were thrown out the window for a virus of limited severity for the vast majority of people.
In fact, Australia had a national pandemic plan that was regularly updated, most recently in August 2019.
A Centre for Independent Studies paper on the response of Australian governments to COVID published on December 9, 2020 found that they ignored their own advice, instead whipping up fear with incoherent and unjustified restrictions.
In ‘Victims of Failure – how the COVID-19 policy response let down Australians’, Monica Wilkie argues that governments did not analyse trade-offs that included soaring public debt, unemployment and mental health problems.
“Measures for fighting coronavirus must be justified and proportionate, and individual liberty must always be protected; these are the very standards governments set themselves in their pandemic influenza plans,” states Wilkie, noting that principles of good governance and democracy have been ignored.
As Wilkie asserts, “by adopting a strategy of coercion early in the pandemic, it became difficult, almost impossible, for responses to the outbreak to abandon this pattern.”
Does anyone recall a full, detailed cost-benefit analysis ever being prepared, let alone published, by the health bureaucrats and the politicians that hid behind them on the public health measures that were implemented?
Professor Gigi Foster of the University of New South Wales did do so in her book ‘Do lockdowns and border closures serve the ‘greater good’? A cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s reaction to COVID-19’, which lays out in depressing detail the costs Australians endured for precious little benefit.
What should be more startling, and shows the evermore pressing need for a full scope inquiry with coercive powers, are the excess death statistics of this country since 2021.
Clare Pain, who coordinates the statistical input to the website www.excessdeathstats.com and writes a Substack, has been following the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) mortality reports.
“As we went through the pandemic the ABS published monthly Provisional Mortality Statistics (PMS), which began to show periods of excess deaths beginning in autumn 2021,” she says.
“The PMS figure published for 2022 reported 15.3 per cent more deaths than the ABS’ ‘baseline’, which can be interpreted as 25,235 more Australians dying that year than expected.
“In July 2023 the ABS published a new model for estimating expected deaths – which are the crux of the excess death calculation. This new model presents a different picture of the pandemic, with lower excess deaths, and we are told now that this is the official measure of pandemic excess deaths.”
The latest release of the new model states there were 11.7 per cent more deaths than expected in 2022, with 19,945 more Australians dying than expected – still marking an historical high.
And, since the ABS reports 9,859 deaths from COVID that year, the virus is clearly not the only cause of the excess mortality, Pain says.
The first half of 2023 was similar to 2022, and the latest estimates of excess deaths in 2023 are 9.9 per cent (PMS), and 6.1 per cent (new model).
Compare Australia’s statistics with those of Sweden.
That country had its peak death rate in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, and had a lower death rate than expected in 2021.
By 2022 the rate was back to normal pre-pandemic levels.
Moreover, as an article from the Cato Institute shows, after all was said and done, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries.
As Johan Norberg, the author of the article points out, the main difference between Sweden’s strategy and that of most other countries was that it relied mostly on voluntary adaptation rather than government force.
We are still paying the costs of what history will before too long consider the worst public policy response in living memory.
School children who had their childhood disrupted for nothing, late-stage cancer patients who skipped routine screenings, persistently high inflation and slow economic growth, a mental health crisis thanks in no small part to the heartless separation of families from loved ones, excess mortality, and one that I have written about before in these pages – severe adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine.
Just last week a public servant in South Australia who was forced to get a COVID vaccination to keep his job, but then fell gravely ill, won a major legal battle and will be paid compensation.
All those who advocated against lockdowns, mandates and other measures, such as Dr Jay Bhattarcharya, were censored, yet are being proven right.
As we saw in this country, the government censored many social media posts about Covid-19 during the pandemic that turned out to be true.
So much for “following the science”.
A fully-fledged COVID royal commission – with wide terms of reference such as those being looked at by this Senate Committee – is essential to ensure those who failed are held to account, and that such public policy failures never happen again.
Dr Rocco Loiacono is a legal academic, writer and translator. Earlier in his career, he spent a decade practicing as a lawyer with Clayton Utz, one of Australia’s top law firms. As well as SkyNews.com.au, he regularly contributes opinion pieces, specialising in politics, freedom and the rule of law, to The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Australian.