Then there was Zoe’s Law, named after Zoe Donegan, who was stillborn after a car accident caused by a drunk driver, and aimed at recognising the separate and distinct rights of the unborn in these sorts of cases.

It is perhaps ironic that this matter was debated in NSW, now home of the unimpeded right of infanticide-on-demand (to use Tony Abbott’s apt phrase).

TROLLING

The latest of these types of “laws” relates to the recently slain British MP, Sir David Amess. David’s Law so-called is the attempt urged by some of his colleagues to stamp out anonymous online trolling of public figures, said to be related to his death.

Then there is Godwin’s Law.

This law states: “As a discussion on the internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person/s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.”

Previously seen as a laughable example of the ad hominem arguments of those struggling to make a case based on substance, these days calling someone (in government) in Australia a Nazi is likely to be perfectly accurate.

Another popular law is called Hanlon’s Razor, which refers to a propensity to believe that bad policies are the result of stupidity rather than conspiracy.

This is another theory under severe pressure in the age of the COVID State, where evidence of convergent opportunism and of Schelling Points abounds. (Schelling Points, named after the American defence and game theory strategist Thomas Schelling, occur when coordination among collaborators can happen without communication. In other words, you can predict how potential collaborators will behave without a formal “conspiracy” being needed. This is a story for another occasion.)

Here is new law that I want to propose for Australian politics.

Let us term it Barnaby’s Law.

This refers to the phenomenon whereby the closer a politician gets to the whiff of ministerial leather, the less likely he or she is to maintain core principles, be willing to defend them in public and to make them the basis for action and policy.

Barnaby Joyce is at his best – admittedly, his best is not much good – when he is not in office.

On the backbench, he can sometimes throw his ideological weight around. When he was a minister first time around, he was close to the invisible man.

DOGS

His one big moment was when he kicked Johnny Depp out of the country over two dogs (Pistol and Boo).

Barnaby was certainly on the quiet side when he had his big chance to “do a McEwen” when the Liberal Party, having crucified Tony Abbott at the second attempt in 2015, installed the Malchurian Candidate as Prime Minister.

All Joyce had to do was say sorry, we in the Nats won’t serve under Turnbull. Just as John McEwen (in)famously did with Billy McMahon in 1967. End. Of. Argument. No, instead he kept schtum. We got Malcolm.

Second time around, since he replaced an authentic, best-in-show invisible man as Nats’ leader, Barnaby has, predictably reverted to type. This time it is worse, much worse.

This time, the Nats under Joyce have thrown a core principle of theirs – or so we thought – out the window, and with it, Australia’s economic future.

On the Nats’ watch, Australia is to embrace the gargantuan folly of “net-zero”, that piece of garbage dragged all over the world by the likes of Greta Tintin Thunberg and Go-Green Boris.

As Johannes Leak recently pointed out, Scotty from AGL now wears a tee shirt proclaiming “vote one for Chloe Shorten’s husband’s climate policy” and Barnaby, next to him, wears one saying “I’m with Stupid”.

Indeed. It falls now to one of Barnaby’s erstwhile followers, Matt Canavan, to continue the fight for our energy supplies and our existence as a viable economy.

The capitulation of the Nationals to the Prime Minister’s utterly inexplicable lurch to the green-Left on climate change – which mirrors, incidentally, the Murdoch press’s similarly inexplicable lurch away from defending fossil fuels – is one of the more disgusting developments in Canberra this century.

(Outside of the craven political acceptance of public health safetyism and the total abdication of responsibility for maintaining national cohesion and individual rights in the age of COVID totalitarianism).

And it was all so predictable. So long as the Nats get an extra cabinet position, they are willing to beggar Australia’s energy future.

These people now simply cannot see past the end of their snouts, ever sniffing for the next available trough.

Their despicable behaviour is worse than that of globalist greenies like Matt Kean, who have never suggested to anyone that they are anything other than climate zealots and shills for the renewable energy sector.

We know exactly where they are coming from, whichever political Party they “should” be in.

ABORTION

With the Nats, we now know, once and for all, that the things they stand for, other than gay rights, euthanasia and abortion, are, well, nothing other than “getting stuff” for their electorates.

This base form of politics – the getting of grants for electoral purposes – is always and everywhere practised most and best by the Nationals.

This, in fact, is the real corruption of politics in NSW (and elsewhere), not the occasional and now revealed, relatively petty rorting of the system by chancers like Darryl Maguire and his sometime girlfriend-in-high-places.

Sadly, the Nationals’ leader is not the only Coalition politician to succumb to Barnaby’s Law.

Only recently, we have had the simultaneously risible and disgraceful bullying of a Fair Work Deputy Commissioner, Lyndall Dean, for the crime of standing up for the right of workers to medical privacy, and of the actual right to work in this now unfairest of countries.

Dean’s “crime” was (principally) to have used the phrase “medical apartheid” in relation to the case of Jennifer Kimber, who had been dismissed from her job for failing to take a flu shot.

Here is what Dean said: “Never have I more strenuously disagreed with an outcome in an unfair dismissal application. The decision manifests a serious injustice to Ms Kimber that required remedy. More egregious, however, is that the majority decision has denied Ms Kimber the protections afforded by the Fair Work Act in part because of ‘an inference that she holds a general anti-vaccination position’.”

But there was (inevitably) more, as pointed out in an ABC report: “On Wednesday, it was revealed Ms Dean had also expressed support for a social media post that argued public-health measures implemented during the pandemic are akin to ‘Chinese-style totalitarian social control’.”

Precisely. The “medical apartheid” description of where Australia is now at is painfully accurate, proportional and fair.

It calls out the vileness of what we are becoming as a nation, or, should I say, a collection of very loosely joined, COVID fiefdoms parading as States of the Commonwealth.

TRY-HARDS

Dean should be a candidate for Australian of the Year. Naturally, ALP try-hards like Tony Burke – yes, he is still around – tore into Dean, comparing her view on vaccines to that coming from the “darker parts of the internet”. A bit like Chris Minns calling Tanya Davies an “anti-vaxxer”.

No, Burke is not the main problem here. One of the rising stars in the Coalition firmament, Amanda Stoker, had this to say about Dean in a senate estimates hearing: “I don’t know what the full suite of Ms Dean’s behaviour has been like, and I think it would be foolish to judge the entirety of a person’s contribution in light of one article.

“But that said, I don’t agree with what she has posted, and it sounds like the procedure that has been put in place by the commission to manage any perception of bias arising from it is appropriate.”

Political safetyism, you might say. Truly pathetic, mealy mouthed safetyism.

Dean’s predicament was the result of a “complaint”.

Her social media “post” was, most likely, hunted down and revealed by a Leftist troll paid by someone to “get Dean”.

The COVID State is out to silence the Deans of this world, in an unholy war on the “anti-vaxxers”, the new lepers to be excluded by the likes of Daniel Andrews from civil life.

This is a cause that, I would have thought, a younger, more principled and activist Amanda Stoker might have relished. Instead, we got what we got from her.

Stoker is another example of the power of Barnaby’s Law.

Of course, Stoker could not be seen to be defending Dean because what Dean was actually attacking was the COVID Statist approach of Stoker’s own government.

They are the ones, after all, who have stopped Australians from leaving the country, who have created an ersatz national COVID decision-making body, the secrecy of whose deliberations the government continues to defend in court, who have failed to defend open interstate borders, who have wasted billions on vaccines that do not work and who have stayed eerily silent while jumped-up dictatorial premiers have taken over the show.

An awkward moment, perhaps, for Amanda Stoker. Doing what ministers are paid to do. Defend the indefensible.

But a little courage might have won her plaudits from those that she should be trying harder to impress.

The Coalition’s base and the people of “Club Sensible” who smell out and despise BS.

AVERSION

Coalition MPs in particular have an aversion these days to standing up for anything that might get them into trouble.

Perhaps backbencher Stoker might have – or might not have – behaved differently, and actually acknowledged that Dean is one, entitled to her view, and two, is bloody well on-point.

It is in cases like this that Barnaby’s Law collides with the peculiar desire of so-called Right-of-centre politicians and journalists to appease their ideological opponents.

God knows why they feel this need, but feel it they do.

Now that Stoker’s rise to ministerial preferment is under way, she much prefers to toe the line than to speak out on matters of basic human rights.

I thought, for example, that she was in favour of freedom of speech. Clearly, not Lyndall Dean’s.

Stoker’s pitiful attempt to defend the government’s decision to starve the National Archives of much-needed funding was noteworthy as a very early example of Barnaby’s Law.

It took an outstanding piece of journalism from Gideon Haigh to get the government to think again. Sadly, it seems that the archives gaff was not to be an isolated incident.

Stoker’s marching in lockstep with bad policy and bad principle is a timely reminder that, these days, the true champions of individual liberty and rights are to be found among the despised mavericks, like Mark Latham, Fred Nile, Craig Kelly and George Christensen.

And now, Senator Gerard Rennick, an emerging seeker of truth in relation to adverse reactions to vaccines, and much more besides.