Repairing our fractured freedoms
Liberal democracy, once imagined as the birthright of every Australian, must not become a permanent casualty of the coronavirus. By Nick Cater.
Let’s suspend our disgust at the defiling of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance this week and consider what drove construction workers to take to the streets in the first place.
On Monday evening, the Premier of the State of Victoria announced that he was shutting down an industry employing more than 300,000 people. Workers in any industry of a similar size, the Victorian public service for example, would have been equally dismayed. They too might have been motivated to take to the streets sporting lanyards in place of high-vis jackets, to protest at the heavy-handed decision made at the whim of an autocratic premier.
While the mob’s behaviour was utterly contemptible, their grievance was not. A state run by the peculiar combination of high-handedness and incompetence that characterises an autocracy will eventually bring its most patient citizens to breaking point.
The protesters’ mistake was to fall for noble-cause corruption, or Dirty Harry syndrome as it is sometimes called, in which the zeal to prosecute a virtuous cause leads to the adoption of immoral methods. The protesters are not the only ones to have fallen for the fallacy that ends justify means. Around the world, governments have been operating on that principle since the start of the pandemic. The police, as the reference to the Clint Eastwood movie suggests, are chronically prone to noble-cause corruption, and this week’s performance in Victoria was no exception.
Joining a peaceful protest would not normally be illegal. Police would normally attend to ensure it stays peaceful, not to shut the whole thing down. Yet the rights to peaceful protest, freedom of association and freedom of expression are currently suspended in Victoria under directions signed by the Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton. The emergency provisions in place since March 16 2020 give the CHO absolute power to over-rule our cherished freedoms.
It was on the strength of Sutton’s signature alone that the police set about dispersing the crowd and issuing arrests for the crime of simply turning up. The adoption of para-military tactics hitherto unprecedented was the decision of Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton. Semi-automatic 175-shot pepper-ball rifles were used to fire capsicum rounds and rubber bullets the size of marbles. Police marched in formation behind armoured vehicles, some armed with 40mm launchers that fire hard, squash-ball-like projectiles designed to hit offenders from 50 metres and impact with the force of a very hard punch. Police were empowered to deliver an even harder punch still in the form of $5,452 fines to anyone found breaching restrictions or gathering in the home or outside.
The pictures circulating on social media are confronting. An elderly woman is shoved to the ground and pepper spray is sprayed directly on her face as she lies defenceless on the road trying to shield her eyes. A man speaking to police at Flinders St Station in an apparently unthreatening manner is suddenly tackled from behind and forced to the ground with a thud.
The soundtrack was more startling than the images. The sound of a mob punctuated with the cracking of rifles, albeit loaded with non-lethal projectiles, sounds foreign to Australian ears.
Holed up in his Melbourne electorate, federal Education Minister Alan Tudge posted on Facebook:
“I do not recognise our city or state anymore. The normal democratic checks and balances are gone. Basic freedoms are denied. The community is fracturing.”
None of the public health measures have been debated in parliament. Parliament was not asked to approve the decision to ratchet up the level of policing by equipping officers with weapons capable of inflicting great pain.
The restrictions on movement were introduced by fiat. They are not subject to review. The edicts change according to autocratic whim, frequently serving no obvious, practical purpose other than to remind people who is in charge.
The arrangements are not dissimilar in New Zealand, where law enforcement has been less brutal than in Victoria, but equally as creepy.
“New Zealand police arrest pair trying to enter Auckland with ‘large amount’ of KFC,” read a headline in the Guardian this week. Takeaways are banned, apparently, under the lockdown rules that applied within Auckland but not the surrounding districts.
The story came with photographs of the contraband, three buckets of chicken and an undisclosed quantity of fries, laid out on the bonnet of a police car.
Oliver Hartwich, the executive director of The New Zealand Initiative, told me in a podcast last week: “I would never have expected such an authoritarian turn of events that I have witnessed in the last two years. As a German in New Zealand I am just flabbergasted at what I’m seeing.
“When I hear that Australians cannot even leave their own country without special permission from the federal government, as a German it reminds you of something in Germany’s past. It reminds you of East Germany. It reminds you of a country that built a wall to stop its own people from leaving.
“And that kind of stuff makes me nervous. I don’t like it because it just brings up all sorts of unpleasant connotations.”
For once, the comparison with Europe’s 20th century experiment with totalitarianism does not seem inappropriate. All around the country in private, whispered conversations, dissent is flourishing. Decent people know that what is happening is wrong.
The suspension of free speech on anything related to the coronavirus is a serious matter. Social media has been leading the charge, but the mainstream media has followed, shutting down opinions, censoring facts and ignoring explanations that diverge from the official line.
There has been a level of global censorship that would have been thought impossible at the start of the crisis. Evidence that the virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory was dismissed as a crackpot theory for over a year. Anyone who suggested as much risked being blocked on Facebook or Twitter. Yet the evidence compiled by Sharri Markson in her book, What Really Happened In Wuhan, allows no room for doubt that the pangolin was wrongly convicted. The most credible explanation is that the virus was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology from a bat virus and did not pass directly from animals to humans.
As a sociologist and journalist, I used to not believe in global cover-ups. Now I do. I have seen one with my own eyes. But for the efforts of Markson and a handful of other inquisitive journalists, backed by employers prepared to take risks, they would still be getting away with it.
Censorship may be necessary at times of war, but it should be used sparingly, mindful of its corrosive effect on trust. Once the gatekeepers have been exposed for having deliberately withheld the truth, how can we be confident of anything beyond the world we can see and touch?
If there is room for an explanation of vaccine hesitancy other than moral depravity or stupidity, it lies in the erosion of trust caused by misinformation and duplicitousness of institutions whose pronouncements once seemed credible from the World Health Organisation down. With the best will in the world, people are struggling to believe what they are told anymore.
Robert Menzies’ prize-winning essay, ‘The Rule of Law During the War,’ written in his early 20s, demonstrates a sharper appreciation of the delicacy of freedom than many of our adult leaders have shown today. He wrote it in 1918 while studying law at the University of Melbourne observing the emergency measures enacted in World War One.
“Some infringements of the ‘Liberty of the subject’ are inevitable in any war. Such infringements have been considerable during the past two years; the power of the Executive, has been much increased, and the full authority of the common law Courts greatly hindered…
“Should the almost arbitrary power of the Executive prove to be anything else but temporary, a very great disaster would have befallen the English Constitution.”
It would be nice to think that the transfer of power from the individual to the state we have witnessed over the last 18 months will be reversed once the pandemic is over. Nice, but improbable. Indeed, the closer we get to the tentative ‘freedom day’, the deeper the incursion by the state into our personal liberties.
Liberal democracies have a remarkable ability to self-correct, underpinned by the principle that not even the ruler is above the law. Yet competing institutions have been slow to respond to the overreach by governments. Much of the mainstream media has been complicit, amplifying the level of fear that drives people to accept authoritarian solutions without complaint.
Where was the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission when we needed it most? Why did once-respected institutions, like the Lancet, not subject the claims of medical scientists to empirical rigour, instead of trying to shut down debate on things we have since learned were wrong?
The muted voices of dissent offer little hope of a v-shaped recovery from this recession of freedom. We are drawn instead to the conclusion that the battle we are currently losing is part of a longer war.
The authoritarian tone of the Woke movement, the intolerance of dissent, the marginalisation of anyone who questions the official line on climate change, the abolition of civilised arguments, the normalisation of character assassination, the unequal distribution of dignity on the basis of sex or skin colour, the re-writing of our history and the policing of the English language with the issuing of heavy on-the-spot penalties and the brutalisation of civic debate were manifestations of the illiberal lurch already there before we’d ever heard of coronavirus.
The message in Jonathan Sumption’s Reith Lecture series the year before the pandemic shows that smart people saw this coming.
“Social media encourage a resort to easy answers and generate a powerful herd instinct which suppresses, not just dissent but even doubt and nuance,” he said. “Public and even private solecisms can destroy a person’s career. Advertisers pressurise editors not to publish controversial pieces and editors can be sacked for persisting. Student organisations can prevent unorthodox speakers from being heard. These things have made the pressure to conform far more intense than it ever was in (John Stuart) Mill’s day…
“We are a lot less ready than we were to respect the autonomy of individual choices. We tend to regard social and moral values as belonging to the community as a whole, as matters for collective and not personal decision.”
Whenever truce is declared in the war against Covid, the urgent task for liberals is reconstruction, to repair the damage to the liberal democracy we once imagined was the birthright of every Australian. We cannot be sure of that now.
We must begin by taking stock of the transfer of power from individuals to the state and begin returning them one by one. We must emancipate our fellow citizens from the tangle of emergency rules and the fear that has enslaved them. Fighting will take a good deal of courage, for those who hold freedom to be enviable, will inevitably be cast as dissenters unhelpful to the greater cause.
Yet fight it we must. We cannot give way to a philosophy that holds that the freedom of individuals can be dispensed for the good of the collective and that democracy can be suspended for the good of public health. We cannot ignore the voices of the quiet Australians who are being shouted down by the noisy few, who are turning up to the offices of MPs in ever larger numbers in search of a champion.
Tudge concludes his post with:
“Whole industries, like construction, shut down at random. Kids are not allowed to go to school or play with their mates.
“My office is inundated with desperate people, who are often in tears. Sometimes grown men cry because their business has been decimated.
“It is not right and cannot go on.”