On July 29, Anthony Fauci sat before a US Senate committee and refused to answer. Senator Rand Paul had released more than a thousand pages of his pandemic journals days before. Paul is now moving for contempt.
In Washington, at least, there are still people prepared to ask the questions that others refuse to confront.
Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson – whom I met in his office in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, in September 2025 – are among those leading the charge for transparency, accountability, and the disclosure of truths too many institutions would prefer remain buried.
In Australia, the institutions that confined people to their homes, cost them their livelihoods, and forced businesses to close have now retreated to a far more comfortable position: nobody could have known.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty. It is time to move on. But that answer is not good enough.
It does not answer what was known at the time, what ought reasonably to have been known, what warnings were disregarded, what evidence was withheld from public debate [FOIs denied], or whether the extraordinary powers exercised against Australians remained necessary and proportionate as circumstances changed.
With notable exceptions – including Senators Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, and Alex Antic, and former Senator Gerard Rennick – too few Australian parliamentarians have been prepared to pursue those questions with the persistence they demand.
The questions remain.
They have not been answered by the passage of time, institutional fatigue, or repeated demands that the country simply move on. We should remind those in power that accountability does not disappear because those responsible would now prefer silence. All we have learnt is that ‘truth is knowledge held back by power’.
I acted in the cases. I read the documents. I examined the agreements between the Commonwealth and the States.
With respect, that defence is not accurate.
The proof was never leaked, never classified and never hidden in some inaccessible archive.
It was published in the Commonwealth’s own filing cabinet, where it sat in plain sight while institutions chose to follow the prevailing mood rather than interrogate the evidence.
The public narrative shifted repeatedly.
First came the certainty surrounding bats and wet markets; then the growing recognition that a laboratory origin could not responsibly be dismissed.
Masks were unnecessary, then essential, then unnecessary again – before becoming mandatory once more. The messaging changed, but the confidence with which it was delivered rarely did.
At the same time, an injection promoted to taxpayers as ‘safe and effective’ was accompanied by continuing demands for masks, distancing, and restrictions. That contradiction was never adequately confronted. If the product justified such absolute public assurances, why were the surrounding controls still said to be indispensable? If uncertainty remained, why was that uncertainty not stated openly and consistently?
The documents were there. The qualifications were there. The inconsistencies were there. What was missing was the institutional willingness to acknowledge them instead of gaslighting the public, journalists, scientists and professionals calling out the inconsistencies!
The failures were not in the cases, rather the system.
Count one: the law itself. On March 18, 2020, the Governor-General declared a human biosecurity emergency under section 475 of the Biosecurity Act. The powers it unlocked came with conditions Parliament wrote itself. Before making any emergency requirement, the Health Minister had to be satisfied of five things: that it was ‘likely to be effective’; ‘appropriate and adapted’; ‘no more restrictive or intrusive than is required in the circumstances’; applied in a manner no more restrictive than required; and in force ‘only as long as is necessary’.
That is a proportionality test, yet it was never transparently applied by those elected to Parliament or by the institutions they control or influence. For three years, Australians were repeatedly told that, because Australia has no national bill of rights, there was no effective legal discipline upon the exercise of emergency power. That proposition was incomplete. Even during what became one of the most serious humanitarian and civil-rights crises in modern Australian history-without New South Wales ever formally declaring a state of emergency-there remained a binding statutory constraint. Section 477(4), unchanged since 2017, applied throughout. It required the Minister to be satisfied that the measures adopted were no more restrictive or intrusive than required in the circumstances, that they were proportionate to the risk, and that they operated only for so long as necessary. We raised those obligations. They were dismissed, however, they should have triggered a discretionary oversight, questions and diligence to enquire – they did not.
The question is simple: On what occasion did any Minister publicly work through each of those statutory conditions as the factual circumstances changed, new variants emerged, population immunity increased, and alternative treatments became available?
There is no such occasion, we can find!
The declaration itself makes it worse. Its own clause 6 recited, as a condition of the emergency, that this was a disease ‘that there was no vaccine against, or antiviral treatment for, immediately before the commencement of this instrument’. True on March 18, 2020. Not true forever, in perpetuity. The recital expired but the powers to lock you down and mandate didn’t – that is the case.
Count two: the regulator’s own report. In January 2021, the TGA published its assessment report for the Pfizer vaccine. It records, in the evaluator’s own words, that ‘the potential of the LNP or the vaccine formulation for complement activation or stimulation of cytokine release was not adequately assessed in nonclinical studies’ – with further investigation ‘recommended unless this particular concern is addressed by clinical data’.
The same page concludes there were ‘no nonclinical objections’ to provisional registration. Fine….right! A regulator may weigh a risk and proceed. What is indefensible is what the country did next: it took the reassurance to the bank and left the caveat on the website. ‘Safe and effective’ ran on every channel, body counts daily. The evaluator’s sentence ran nowhere and the public was not aware leaving open the principle of informed consent and ‘CHOICE’.
Count three: the minister’s own mouth. On February 22, 2021, Health Minister Greg Hunt said it plainly, on the record: ‘We’re engaged in the world’s largest ever vaccination rollout and, at the same time, effectively, clinical trial.’ His words, official transcript, still online. A rollout described by its own minister as effectively a global clinical trial became, within months, a condition of keeping your job.
Count four: the judge’s finding. In Kassam v Hazzard we challenged the NSW orders and presented experts from around the world. The Court held they did not authorise involuntary vaccination – correct, and I have never said otherwise. But at paragraph 59, Beech-Jones CJ at CL accepted the orders had ‘either an encouraging effect or even a coercive effect so far as vaccination is concerned’. Sit with that. The coercion is not my characterisation; it is judicially recorded. Having recorded it, the Court held the merits were a question of policy – for the executive. Essentially, the same executive that made the orders. The coercion was noticed, and no one was ever made to justify it.
Count five: the border test. Only one Australian court ever reached the human rights question, because only one Parliament had armed it with one. In Johnston v Carroll, Martin SJA declared the Queensland Police Commissioner’ vaccination directions unlawful under section 58 of the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld) – proper consideration of human rights had not been given – and restrained their enforcement. New South Wales has no such Act. Same pandemic, same pathogen, same product, same worker: lawful on one side of a border, unlawful on the other. That is not science, it is geography in a lab coat.
And the officials knew what they were doing because they understood the gravity of their decisions. In April 2020, Queensland’s Chief Health Officer, Dr Jeannette Young, told the Brisbane Times why schools were closing: ‘Sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging.’ She was appointed Governor of Queensland the following year.
In August 2020, deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth said the first step ‘is never the stick’ – then predicted ‘a strong public view’ that there needed to be ‘some sort of incentive stick perhaps’. The stick came and human rights exited. In February 2024, after the Queensland ruling, he told breakfast television ‘we did get that wrong’.
While the front door was being locked, the back door was closing too. The Commonwealth’s vaccine claims scheme required hospital admission as an inpatient and losses of $1,000 or more – pain and suffering expressly excluded. It stopped taking new claims on 30 September 2024 and now the statute of limitations has closed the door on future claims – they call this justice, but thank you for rolling up your sleeve … it was your choice!
So let us retire the alibi. Hindsight is what you plead when the information was not available. The test was in section 477(4). The caveat was on the regulator’s website. The ‘clinical trial’ line is in the minister’s transcript. The coercion is at paragraph 59.
None of it was hidden. It was unwanted, overlooked and now ignored by most of Parliament who continue to ignore the injured and bereaved.
I have no doubt that the legal battles are far from over. Those who bring the next wave of challenges will not enter an untouched field. They will step onto a battlefield already shaped by urgent applications, unprecedented arguments, and legal contests of a kind rarely or not seen in Australian jurisprudence.
Their cases will be built upon foundations laid by those who advanced when the outcome was uncertain, the pressure of lockdowns and mandates was immense and the institutional guns were still firing on the citizens to roll up their sleeves. They did not wait for safety, hindsight or public approval. They moved when rights were under immediate threat, when the law was untested and when defeat carried real personal and professional consequences.
We should not forget the brave attempts of Paramedic John Larter who also challenged the NSW Government. Once a hero during Covid he was terminated from employment for not choosing to be mandated with an experimental jab … from saving lives to being hit the stick.
One thing is certain, the Senate inquiry in the USA featuring Dr Fauci have changed the public’s perception of power, more importantly, it has exposed a credibility gap involving almost every institution.
The next challenges will benefit from that courage. They will inherit the authorities, evidence, arguments, and hard-won lessons forged by those who crossed the battlefield while it was still under fire – not by those who arrived only after the guns had fallen silent.
The institutions now asking you to move on are asking for closure without disclosure, forgiveness without accountability, silence without answers. They are entitled to none of the three until the record – their own record – is answered and the public should not yield until such accountability is forthcoming.
Hold-the-line!
Tony Nikolic is a solicitor and Director of Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates.
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