She has been dubbed “Mrs Everywhere”. More importantly, she has also been termed “the global expert in pandemic preparedness”.

(Her university degree was in psychology, which has perhaps come in handy for her in our current era of fear, nudging and “mass formation”, as Mattias Desmet terms the driver of COVID totalitarianism).

HEADLINE

One headline noted in 2020: “Coronavirus Australia: Did Tony Abbott predict the global COVID-19 pandemic?

In 2007, Tony Abbott made predictions of a global flu pandemic killing thousands of Australians and seriously affecting the economy.

Chillingly, the story continued: “In 2007 Tony Abbott swung Australia into readiness of a global flu virus pandemic, spending $600m on ‘pandemic preparedness’ economically and even predicting ‘extreme fear’ in the community.

“He also suggested at the time the Federal Government might consider new powers to quarantine people in their own homes in the event of a flu pandemic.”

Abbott was clearly an early victim of Pandemic Preparedness Syndrome. It is almost impossible not to see Halton’s fingerprints on this.

As Abbott himself has mused: “How to deal with a potential pandemic was often on my mind during four years as health minister in the Australian government of John Howard. In those days, hundreds of people – nearly all in East Asia and living in close contact with poultry – contracted bird flu; and about a half died.

“The fear back then was that a pandemic variant could become an even more deadly form of the Spanish flu, that killed up to 50 million people, mostly between 20 and 40, in the wake of the Great War (including over half a million from a then-US population of just on a hundred million); or a supercharged version of the Asian flu that killed upwards of a million people world-wide in the late 1950s; or the Hong Kong flu that killed another million or more in the late 1960s.

“… Still, as the minister who would have been blamed for any deficiency in Australia’s pandemic preparedness, I beefed up the National Medicine Stockpile (including one of the world’s largest holdings of anti-viral drugs), established the Australian Health Protection Committee, and made formal speeches laying out the initial plan to deal with any crisis. (emphasis added)

FEAR

The politician’s greatest fear. To be caught short in a “pandemic”. The fear of blame. This core concern of politicians, the useful idiots, kicked in, big time, in March 2020.

They played into the hands of the ideologues and totalitarians in the early days of panic. The bureaucrats who had prepared the ground for the panic.

Abbott continued: “No decent government could allow its hospitals to be overwhelmed, or contemplate with equanimity a new disease predicted to kill over two million people in the United States, up to half a million in Britain, and 150,000 in Australia.”

Here is the core reason for “flattening the curve”. In other words, the politicians simply believed the catastrophist modellers. They were scared to begin with. They had absorbed the pandemic preparedness ideology.

They believed the likes of Neil Ferguson, a modeller with an appalling record who somehow still managed (and manages) to collect a public pay packet. (Private sector employees who make such blunders are normally shown the door, pronto.)

But there is more: “Faced with the prospect of death on such a scale, of course governments were going to ban travel, to close places of gathering, and to order people to stay at home as far as possible. And with the economy in an induced coma, governments really had no choice but to subsidise wages, freeze foreclosures and scrap rules about seeking work.” (emphasis added)

Of course? This attitude beggars belief. It basically says, we simply accept the rule by experts.

Perhaps he was still wedded to the advice of the aforementioned Jane Halton, now used by Bill Gates to advance the pandemic narrative globally.

Finally, from Tony Abbott, still thinking as a health minister: “And it’s sensible to err on the side of caution.”

Err, no it wasn’t. Perhaps “caution” might have suggested a sober approach to crushing the freedoms and rights of citizens and a sceptical approach to trusting the modelling of failed academics

Caution would have recognised fifty years of public health science which suggested that lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions were not the preferred path.

CAUTION

Let alone vaccine mandates. This is not even a close simulacrum of “caution”.

Pandemic preparedness has a certain appeal to trusting politicians, even those as normally sensible as Tony Abbott.

Abbott’s typically measured consideration of the dilemmas of governments when confronted with bureaucratic advice that politicians assume to be “rational”, but which in practice we now know to have been compromised and ideological, sums up the democratic dilemma we face.

Of course, it was Abbott’s Government that, in 2015, passed the egregious Biosecurity Act that delivered Australia’s COVID totalitarianism.

Legislation that was prepared for government by those who were already committed to “pandemic preparedness”. And it didn’t remotely see the dangers of the powers written into the legislation.

When the policymaker is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Abbott also once said: “Almost certainly, preparing thoroughly for disasters which don’t eventuate will help prepare for those which do.”

So long as we retain in the political class the capacity to discern what is, and what is not, an emergency.