WA Lockdown, page-83

WA POLITICIANS ARE EXPLOITING CORONA TO SERVE THEIR GRAB FOR MORE POWER AND CONTROL

Bill Muehlenberg has posted on his website an excellent review the book “Fundamental Rights in the Age of Covid-19”. It is now available on his CultureWatch website. As he points out:

“If the past 10 or 11 months have taught us anything, it is this: If you ever wondered how tyranny could come to the West; if you ever wondered how our basic human rights and freedoms could be stolen away from us; if you ever wondered how the state could take total control; well, now we know.

“We know full well how it works. We have lived through it. We have seen it happening with our own eyes. It is upon us as we speak. The corona crisis has provided the perfect excuse for all this to happen – and it has happened with incredible ease.

Here is the quick and easy three-step process that we have been witnessing:

STEP ONE. The state manufactures or exploits a crisis or emergency.

STEP TWO. The state and the media hyper-inflate the fear, magnify the alarmism, and peddle the panic-porn.

STEP THREE. The masses fully buy the panic and succumb to the fear, and readily –even happily – do whatever they are told with no questions asked.

“And there you go. This is your perfect storm for instant tyranny. This is how you willingly and gladly give away all your freedoms and basic human rights. This is indeed how it ends. Instead of learning to live with a virus which may have at best a one per cent fatality rate, we have become a nation of sheeple in full-blown panic and terror.

“We see this happening week after week in Australia. Indeed, almost every day we encounter a new indication of this madness from our power-drunk leaders – and a willingness to go along with it by the masses"

"Here [is] just a recent example[] of this:

"One case – just one case – of corona is found in Perth, and the entire state is sent into lockdown with the compulsory mask-wearing and so on, and other states such as Victoria yet again restrict travel to WA.”

To read more, visit Bill Muehlenberg's “CultureWatch” website.

By the way, he has contributed an important chapter to the book. There he examines the following six matters:

-How crises can lead to increasing powers of the state;

-How the nature of risk needs to be responsibly dealt with by individuals and states;

-How some government policies and programs entail a notion of the perfectibility of human nature; how far things like security and safety can be mandated and enforced by the state;

-How concerns about religious freedom interact with concerns about public health and safety; and

-how feasible or desirable something like just revolution might be if statist overreach becomes too onerous.

Other eminent contributors include:

-Professor Rex Ahdar, University of Otago

-Professor James Allan, The University of Queensland

-Morgan Begg, The Institute of Public Affairs

-Emeritus Professor David Flint AM

-Professor Anthony Gray, University of Southern Queensland

-Dr Weronika Kudla, Jagiellonian University

-Dr Grzegorz Blicharz, Jagiellonian University

-Dr Rocco Loiacono, Curtin University

-Emeritus Professor **riël A. Moens, The University of Queensland

-Dr Monika Nagel PhD

-Dr Johnny Saker LLM, PhD

-Professor Steven Alan Sanson, Liberty University

-Distinguished Professor Emeritus William Wagner, Western Michigan University

Since Premier McGowan has just imposed a strict lockdown on the citizens of Western Australia, it may be particularly important for them read the chapter by Professor Rex Adhar.

In this chapter, Professor Adhar critically reflects upon the serious costs of lockdowns. His chapter shows that the mitigation strategy, ultimately ignored by the WA government, was and is a preferable strategy once the indirect and long-term costs and benefits of radical lockdown measures are considered.

As stated by Professor **riel A. Moens AM in his excellent article, such lockdown measures are deeply paternalistic in nature, having an enormous and deleterious effect on the rights of people, including unintended consequences for the protection of their own health.

Professor Moens then critically assesses the reasonableness of Covid-19 laws and regulations, highlighting as a leading constitutional law academic the perceived invalidity of such government actions.

In sum, the WA Government must be held accountable for measures that have aenormous effect on fundamental rights and freedoms, and even unintended consequences for the protection of the very health of the population.

You can order a copy of the book from the publisher’s website atconnorcourtpublisging.com.au

To read the full review, visit billmuehlenberg.com

Professor Augusto Zimmermann LLB, LLM, PhD