What Taiwan’s experience demonstrates is that it was most important to control overseas entry and to protect the vulnerable but that it was extremely foolish to lockdown, even briefly, the productive economy.

And as suggested here, the government could even now collaborate with the Americans (and certainly not the WHO) on a process to recover substantial reparations from Beijing.

In anticipating an emergency, provision seems rarely, if ever, made for the proper verification of the power to make subordinate legislation, through, for example, the Executive Council as well explained by Sir Guy Green.

Instead, parliaments were extremely negligent in delegating their terrifying powers to destroy vast parts of the economy, jobs and indeed lives to just one not necessarily wise or even competent politician.

HOSTILE

This will, more often than not, be someone who has hardly ever had what many Australians would see as a real job. Theirs will have been an apprenticeship in the too often odious practice of modern politics, which has absolutely nothing to do with good government. As Orwell says, it is all about a “mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia”.

Even before the pandemic, our hopeless politicians had managed to send most manufacturing to communist China and other countries while conducting a hostile campaign against our farmers. Because of them, we will become as much a net importer of food as we are of manufactured goods.

But with the pandemic the Gang of Nine have created not so much the worst-ever recession, but the first depression since the Thirties. Originally as claimed to be to flatten the curve, this has been surreptitiously changed to doing the impossible, eradicating the virus.

Meanwhile Premier Berejiklian confirmed her dream – but anyone sensible’s nightmare – of closing down every real unsubsidised power station, asserting that her government must buy Chinese-made trains because Australians aren’t good at manufacturing.

No, Premier. What Australians are not good at is electing politicians with common sense and a commitment to the national interest. Instead, we have politicians who buy foreign trains and ferries infused with asbestos that don’t fit as well as trams whose installation take years longer than agreed and which wrecks thousands of small businesses.

DANSTAPO

On the other hand our politicians are very good at handing over properties, including a vast bus system without going to tender, giving away a coal-fired power station, looking after powerbrokers and closing down State borders to win an election and never harvesting water. The Gang of Nine may well succeed in consolidating all this and in turning this once prosperous, happy, free and exceptional country into if not the Venezuela, then certainly the Argentina of the South Seas.

So, if the politicians cannot help, will the courts step in? We have already seen Victorian courts trying to change the criminal law so that guilt is no longer to be proved beyond reasonable doubt, replaced by believing any victim found when DANSTAPO have advertised. As Beria boasted, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”.

Saved from this by the High Court, how likely is it this court will act to protect freedom of political speech as implied in the Constitution? Recent decisions in which the court has upheld political free speech exclusion zones as large as 70,000 square metres around abortionists and even some GP’s rooms are hardly encouraging.