by PAUL COLLITS – WITH the departure from high office of the Unspellable Premier north of the Tweed, we have lost our last COVID Gauleiter. They are now all gone.
This will be widely noted by those of us for whom the dictators Down-Under have left a very nasty reflux. Repulsive tyrants down to a man and woman, who should all be in prison – and not crossing the horizon to a pleasant, hyper-superannuated retirement.
- Can we decide who was Australia’s worst plandemic leader, now they’ve all slithered off like the snakes they are?
- Each of the State and Territory place-warmers was differently bad.
- But the gap between them is far narrower than many think. Probably still think.
One might have preferred that, instead, each of them might have been somehow transported into the heart of a grisly novel by the late Cormac McCarthy.
But, alas, just as we approach the deadline for submissions to the (Australian) COVID Non-Inquiry, which somehow manages to exclude everything that State and Territory Governments did to us, it is not to be.
Justice will have to await the far side of the grave for these merchants of death.
Australia was, infamously, criticised by China for being too tough with our brutal responses and associated theatre. Higher praise would not be possible. Who was our worst?
In assessing the comparative damage, we can safely leave out the minor viral adjutants from Tasmania and South Australia. They were so unmemorable that many would be hard pressed even to recall their names.
We will stick to the Unspellable Women from either side of the NSW-Queensland border (which, for much of COVID-time, was closed), the Tyrant by the Yarra, his Macquarie Street mate called The Dom, Scotty from AstraZeneca, Mad Mark from Perth, and the wild-eyed, absolute nutter from Darwin (Dan’s Mini Me).
This lot is enough to be going on with.
Every last one of our “leaders” brought something different to the table.
SCOTT MORRISON
Scotty deserves special mention. After all, he created the national lockdown, the lock-in, the lock-out, the trillion dollar bill, the 250 million or so vaccines and that grotesque simulacrum of decision-making, the National Cabinet.
He gave cover to those in the State and Territory capitals that committed many of the atrocities. Then he tried to claim – admittedly not as appallingly as his opposite number across the Ditch – that he wasn’t responsible for vaccine mandates. That no one was forced to get the jab!
Scotty helped to fund vaccine re-education camps, I mean quarantine centres. Those massive white elephants that stand proudly empty now. As useful as a desalination plant.
Morrison could have stopped it all in an instant. For the Commonwealth ultimately holds the fiscal aces and can play them if it wants to, any time it chooses.
DANIEL ANDREWS
Everyone overseas probably thinks that the Man from Williamstown (Victoria) was our worst COVID dictator. And they have a point.
Not too many Victorians would want to argue the point, though a goodly number of them would probably still approve of the actions taken.
Oddly, some normally sensible (on a good day) columnists agreed with Dan’s southern acolytes. Like Angela Shanahan at The Australian newspaper.
It is tiresome to repeat Andrews’ crimes, but absent any likely punishment, we must. The rubber bullets, the sins of VicPol, the tasering, the arrests of the innocent.
Jail time for hero-protesters like Monic Smit. The longest lockdowns anywhere. People locked in towers of misery. Heads smashed into concrete floors.
Corruptly-awarded contracts for hotel quarantine lockdowns. A useless quarantine camp at Mickleham, which cost a cool $580m and was closed in October 2022 “ahead of schedule”. As if it was always built only then to be closed.
They do have a hide with the words they use. Many of us would call it “lying”.
And last … a Victorian of the Year award handed to (Chief Health Officer) Brett Sutton, the man who gave us Slug-gate and shuttered children’s playgrounds, lest parents secretly meet over coffee and foment revolution or simply breed counter-narratives.
(Brett, brother-in-law of Jane Halton, Bill Gates’ point-girl in Oz, is now pottering away at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra. And probably voted “Yes” like most of the other bloated felines in national capital).
Then, all of a sudden, Andrews simply and abruptly declared “COVID exceptionalism” over. A bit like the Commonwealth Games. Just like that.
As swimming great Dawn Fraser says, I don’t know how he sleeps at night. He was, and is, low rent. A typical twenty-first century politician, you might say. A machine man. A China worshipper. A disdainer of the people who pay his salary. Woke as they come. Snide. A megalomaniac. A careerist. One who doesn’t have to reach too far to locate his inner Lenin. Never sees a progressive cause he doesn’t reflexively love. Capital B brazen. Has no shame. Never says sorry. Why would he? He never says or does anything wrong.
So much for the Dictator of the South.
GLADYS BEREJIKLIAN
Next, to the Rum Corps State across the Murray. One got awfully tired of conservatives telling us that NSW “wasn’t as bad as the others”. (A bit of misplaced Liberal Party protectionism going on there).
Telling us that Gladys and her inconsequential, dumbo successor were “COVID liberals”. They were not. They enforced awful lock-ups in south west Sydney, stopped people travelling from their localities there, supervised the curfews with Army helicopters, embarked upon vicious vaccine mandates for their own employees, some of which persisted until well after the non-scare was deemed to have passed, lied over and over, kept in employment the Health Hazzard and his equally dictatorial offsider, Kerry “new world order” Chant.
They attempted to complete the destruction of the Sydney CBD economy they started prior to COVID with the insane lock-up laws (shutting down the night economy because of a single bashing in Kings Cross) and with the multi-year shutdown caused by the construction of the light rail system, both of which absolutely crushed CBD businesses.
The final act of economic destruction was occasioned by allowing city workers to “work” from home. The NSW Government made Sydney a ghost town for two years, crushing economic activity through their sedation actions that were out of all proportion to the viral threat faced.
No, NSW was never COVID-liberal. They just didn’t shoot people with rubber bullets. Does that make them heroes? I think not.
Apart from being locked out of Kmart and Big W for a month by the “liberal” Perrottet (for not succumbing to the death jab), something I will never forget, my favourite NSW memory was having my companion at the cricket test asked by police for the name and phone number of his doctor. For not wearing a mask. My friend is an asthmatic. Masks are a no-no.
These were police who admitted to not being remotely across what the rules actually were. This occurred while we were sitting up the back of a virtually empty stand – the numbers allowed to go to the game were reduced to 10,000 in a 40,000 capacity stadium – in the open air in the middle of a Sydney summer.
All because there were a few alleged “cases” of the dreaded virus (determined by dodgy PCR tests) on the northern beaches of Sydney. That has to be up there, but we will all have our favourite lunatic stories.
Let us skip across the Nullarbor.
MARK McGOWAN
Of course, we had Mad Mark from the West. In State of Origin terms, a boy actually from Newcastle. With a half decent High Court, his Government would have been done (in Palmer v Western Australia) for damages, for locking out Clive Palmer from doing business through McGowan’s insane border closures.
(Clive could have been a COVID hero, by the way, if he had been allowed to distribute all of the Ivermectin he bought up and imported. This proven-to-be-effective cure was, naturally, banned by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, literally in the pay of Big Pharma which could only get its emergency approval for the vaccines because there was deemed not to be available an alternate treatment. But that is another story).
Our most Westerly government was probably most infamous for the breathtakingly stupid decisions to enforce lockdowns over single “cases”.
McGowan was Mr COVID-Zero, on a par with NZ’s Jacinda Ardern for the sheer madness of the power of man over virus. The bizarre faith in human capacity to prevail over germs (a bit like defeating the elements), whether manufactured in a Chinese lab or not, found a true believer in Perth.
Swing east again.
MICHAEL GUNNER
The man from Darwin, now safely ensconced in the private sector courtesy of Twiggy Forrest, was the master of the wild-eyed rant against anti-vaxxers.
Most practitioners of the 11am daily presser were able to keep their vicious pro-vaxxism under wraps, but not Michael Gunner.
He was a-gunning for those of us who have been vindicated by the science and who knew all along not to trust the gene-therapies they were peddling on behalf of their corporate masters from the pharmaceuticals sector.
We knew then, and they know now – even though they are too frightened to admit it – that the vaccines, not vaccines at all in fact, were unnecessary, ineffective and dangerous.
But the Chief Minister of the glorified local council in our tropical north was having none of that. He had his Howard Springs detention centre on the go, and wanted it occupied.
And so he sought to fill it up with confused, indeed bewildered, Aborigines from remote communities who themselves were exhibiting more than a little “vaccine hesitancy”. (A little like their “yes” vote hesitancy).
Gunner sent in the storm troopers to round them up and send them off the be imprisoned in the camp.
ANNASTACIA PALASZCZUK
Which brings us back to where we began. To the now mercifully departed Queen of the Sunshine State. The Destroyer of the Gabba. (One can only wonder if The Unspellable’s Labor successor will do an Andrews and pull the plug on the Olympics).
When COVID called on dictators-in-waiting to step up to the tyrannical plate, Annastacia was not found wanting.
First, there was the ludicrousness of a hot climate, outdoor-living State fighting a virus that does best in the cold and (ironically) the indoors.
Then there were the vicious border closures. And building not one but two quarantine camps. Oh, and stopping hospital treatment for southerners because they are “Queensland” hospitals.
Even NSW’s Health Hazzard thought this beyond the pale. She really was a shocker.
In retirement her announcement, Annastacia encouraged Queenslanders to “come say hello” if they saw her out and about in the future, telling them: “Don’t be a stranger.”
I don’t think the people of Queensland will be so kind as to treat her with such courtesy. Good riddance, and let’s hope we don’t have to see your face again.
Where does this leave we-the-people? In the era of non-inquiries, we will only ever diminish the chances of it all happening again – beware the coming scariant – if we keep banging on about it. The evil acts. The media’s complicit support for evil doers. The slimy academics. The bureaucrats. The compromised medical regulatory agencies. The silent backbenchers of all political Parties bar the micro freedom Parties (one of them headed by the aforementioned Clive Palmer).
Ultimately, the decision-makers simply could not rise above their own craven weakness in the face of a “threat” that could have been utterly dismissed with five minutes online searching, some knowledge of history, scepticism about the treason of the “experts” and a modicum of common sense.
Instead, they were scared witless of the verdict of social media, and of losing the whiff of ministerial leather. Whether or not they were intrinsically evil, they did evil. All of them.
What a truly miserable lot. Covid “management” in Australia constituted an epic fail by the political class. But it was far more than that, and the failure by many, both within and outside that class, to see this represents a continuing lacuna in our polity and our debates.
We know this to be the case because the media and the extant and forthcoming non-inquiries (here and overseas) only ever ask second order questions. Treating the COVID policy catastrophe as a mere political “failure”, just like all the others, does great harm to the truth.
COVID Stalinism was a demonic episode and not merely a blip or misstep. Lines were crossed. We cannot unsee what we witnessed.
ANTHONY ALBANESE
Finally, there is Albo. We mustn’t forget him, much as we might want to.
What can you say about one so insignificant in the scheme of things? Well, he has given us the non-Inquiry, and he agreed with everything all the COVID fascists did and said. And rode to office on the back of it all.
Without a mandate, without any popular good will, without policies, without even much recognition, with a clueless ministry of Leftist women and the odd male stooge to make up the numbers.
But with a desire to ruin a once great nation. Not a COVID criminal in the worst sense, but a fellow traveller. An accessory before, during and after the fact. Hence jailable.
THE VERDICT
Can we decide who was the worst Australian leader during the plandemic, now that they have all slithered off like the snakes they are?
Clearly the worst was Andrews. Not much debate there. He had the greatest natural aptitude for totalitarianism. He has been our very own Pol Pot.
But the gap between him and the rest is far narrower than many think. Probably still think.
Getting your cops to shoot at innocent citizens simply going about their business tends to stick in the memory. Arresting pregnant mothers as well.
But each of the State and Territory place-warmers was differently bad.
We will not forget them as a cohort of destruction any time soon, even as their individual names deservedly vanish down the memory hole.PC
The government has lost the plot. Instead of looking after the interests of Australia they are looking after the interests of UN, WEF and global corporations.
The whole response to covid was based on the PCR test which was notoriously inaccurate. https://thetimetospeak.com/the-pcr-test-is-not-accurate/
The government should have worked that out at some point but didn’t, and now covering up their flawed response to covid. And now they want to implement the Dis- and Misinformation legislation to make them the arbiters of what is true. This can’t be allowed to happen.
Thanks Paul, we must not forget, you expressed my thoughts and anger……..but on the other hand we must remember that all the communist university educated bureaucrats in all 3 levels of govt are still there deeply entrenched, I think only a major calamity will shake them out of it. A minor criticism, the spelling of the Queensland premier’s name or anyone’s for that matter is not a fair target for ridicule, but I have the same level of distaste for the person.
A brilliant article and savagely funny – just one error though, Clive Palmer imported hydroxychloroquine, not ivermectin, I’m pretty sure
Shame across the board as excess deaths continue to pile up.
Isn’t it important to consider the three levels of government, areas of responsibility and powers?
For example, the emergency powers the states imposed were legislated in state parliaments and enforced via state public health and police forces, interstate borders and controls are state responsibility and therefore quarantine for travellers inside Australia.
The National Leaders Cabinet was previously the Council Of Australian Governments renamed and was created to try and gain cooperation and coordination between the State Premiers (and Territories), but as many media reports have revealed the Labor Premiers used that forum and the pandemic for party political purposes against the Liberal-National Coalition, Morrison Government. There was nothing that the Prime Minister could do to interfere in state affairs according to constitutional laws.
Of course the Commonwealth or Federal Government has what is described as “fiscal aces”, funding grants to the states. On the other hand, with due consideration for the circumstances prevailing, including the scare campaigning by states, wouldn’t playing “fiscal aces” have been political suicide?
Prime Minister Albanese and Comrades are apparently prepared to establish a Royal Commission into the pandemic period, but not involving inquiries into state governments involvement. In other words a protection racket to cover up the political games involved.
Here is a guide to the areas of responsibility;
https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/three-levels-of-government/three-levels-of-government-governing-australia
You are absolutely right, all 3 levels fo govt were complicit and they haven’t gone anywhere.
It’s hard to pick a winner in this race to the bottom, but the former PM is a nose ahead of the rest.
I’m not sure whether his continued presence in Parliament is a comment about his hubris – Australia’s Churchill, waiting to be recalled – or the inertia of his party.
Perhaps he’s just too damn lazy to go out and get a real job.
Let’s not forget Josh ‘I believe in small government’ Frydenberg, who underwrote the whole show financially. Also mercifully gone, albeit to a cushy job in the banking sector, leaving ordinary Australians suffering the hangover of the most massive government spend ever.