No, this review was commissioned by a public health-embedded foundation and delivered by a government and academic insider. So not especially “independent” as claimed.

And certainly nothing too out-there recommended. Like the culprits behind lockdowns, lockouts and mandates being put on trial, Nuremberg Two-style. As many of us want.

BEHIND THE INQUIRY

The Paul Ramsay Foundation and two other foundations funded the inquiry. It was led by Professor Peter Shergold, a former – if they are ever really “former” – powerbroker in the Australian government establishment, a Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, no less, and a prominent academic at a Group of Eight university.

He would probably be chuffed if you called him a public intellectual. He remains Chancellor of Western Sydney University.

Here is how “trusted reporter” Michelle Grattan summed up the review panel: “Fault lines: An independent review into Australia’s response to COVID-19 was chaired by Peter Shergold, a former secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department. The panel included businesswoman Jillian Broadbent; Isobel Marshall, a social entrepreneur and former Young Australian of the Year; and Peter Varghese, a former secretary of the foreign affairs department.”

All insiders, then. Not an everyday Aussie, let alone a COVID dissident, in sight. No vaccine doubters (of course; that would be heretical). No avowed lockdown sceptics.

What Ramsay did would be like asking Tim Flannery to do a review of climate policy.

I suppose we should be grateful Ramsay didn’t ask Jane Halton to do the review. Despite her being hopelessly compromised as a globalist, Bill Gates insider, she gets asked to do most things, policy-review wise, in relation to COVID.

Who did the research and writing? Here the review panel relied for the grunt work on an outfit called the e61 Institute.

These are largely thirty-somethings most of whom I have never heard, largely from universities and corporates here and overseas. There is an emphasis on ex-pats, it seems.

The name of one of this Institute’s senior fellows did stand out, however.

INFLATED

This is Warwick McKibbin, whose modelling suggested in early 2020 that COVID could take the lives of 96,000 Australians and 68m worldwide. (World deaths currently stand at 6.58m, according to Our World in Data, and this number is simply an estimate and probably inflated, based on “dying with” rather than “of”.

Australian deaths, with similar caveats, stand at 15,569 at the time of writing. So, McKibbin was out by orders of magnitude.

While he had several scenarios as part of his modelling, it was the worst-case scenario, naturally, that made the headlines and helped drive policy responses, and this may well have been the intent.

Such numbers were always fantasies, at best naïve catastrophism, at worst, part of the establishment’s fear campaign. As we shall see, this review still forgives the blind lunacy of the early days that was based on nothing.

The Australian newspaper has provided a convenient (and very benign) snapshot of e61, including its funding by something called the Susan McKinnon Foundation established by a wealthy young tech entrepreneur (Grant Rule, who is also a Director of e61, and who recently sold his tech start-up for $1.7b).

The other Director of e61, Greg Kaplan, has been described as a “rock star ex-pat” and an economist. With very few exceptions, the economics profession has been woefully missing during COVID. Cost-benefit analyses of policies, anyone?

ROCK STAR

Kaplan is a mate of that other rock star, former Accenture boss and Kevin Rudd staffer, Andrew Charlton, now the Labor member for Parramatta.

So, the people who did the work for this tainted review are pretty much all well-off, hyper-connected – connected to each other, at any rate – millennials who are now the emerging insider class.

The elite’s apprentices. The Rock Star Insiders, you might say. Sooner or later, when looking at these bright young things and their institutions’ web pages, you hit the cliches.

Like “big data” and “evidence-based policy”. The Shergold report is itself littered with cliches. It’s a pity that the review showed such little interest in evidence-based policy in relation to epidemiology.

So, in sum, the Shergold review was actually done by rich, teenaged, globe-trotting rock stars who, like so many tech types, feel entitled and qualified to dabble in public policy, even in political system reengineering, and, as usual, to do it through the apparently benign channel of philanthropy.

The latter is now the preferred pathway for rich geeks to run the world. The Bill Gates model, precisely. And they pretty much all have a shared worldview.

It is little surprise, then, that their output looks and sounds pretty clueless, and removed from the real world. These people are the new managerial class. They are, in sum, technocrats, and their report is one for the technocrats who now run our governments.

The question is, is the report negligent as well as self-serving? And is it negligent because it is self-serving?

POLITICAL RESPONSE

Not least of all of the review’s substantive faults is the out that it provides for complicit governments, their health bureaucrats and assorted third parties that did much of the heavy lifting on behalf of the pandemic tyranny.