Would you believe that New Zealanders have a guaranteed right to freedom of speech? It’s right there in the New Zealand Bill of Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference and Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
Which might come as a surprise to those New Zealanders getting visits from Thought Police goon squads for holding opinions and seeking to receive and impart information that the government disapproves of.
But, of course, New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission took a few minutes out from obsessing over Israel to stand up for the human rights of Kiwis being trampled by an increasingly authoritarian government?
Ha. There’s about as much chance of that as Australia’s taxpayer-funded Human Rights panjandrums standing up for the rights of Victorians.
What a farce human rights have become. For years progressive politicians, academics and activists have called for stronger protection for human rights, new codes, new laws — and well-staffed commissions costing millions to oversee them. Democracies just couldn’t be trusted.
Indeed, this year has witnessed the most extraordinary attack on freedoms by democratic governments in modern history, making a mockery of such human rights acts and conventions. Yet there’s been barely a peep from those in the human rights industry, who’ve perhaps been enjoying working from home on their large taxpayer guaranteed salaries.
Well, Victoria’s own HRC has been busy earning its $10 million dollars annual funding. In reaction to the Andrews government’s trampling of Victorians’ freedom of movement, to work, to not have police kick down their doors without a warrant, the VHRC says its focus is on “reducing racism” and “improving workplace gender equality”.
Well, I guess you can’t get more equal than all Melbournians under house arrest and forbidden from working (unless they’re public servants, of course).
In 2014 the Australian Human Rights Commission was up in arms about counter-terrorism legislation that provided for “control orders” to be placed on suspected terrorists, which could have constrained their freedom of movement. But putting millions of people, suspected of doing nothing wrong, under house arrest for months, and contributing to panic and the biggest economic downturn in a century? Crickets[…]
The Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Act of 2008, under which much of the lockdown restrictions in Victoria have been enacted, says “the spread of an infectious disease should be prevented or minimised with the minimum restriction on the rights of any person”. By November 2, Melbourne will have been in lockdown for 22 weeks since March 30. That doesn’t sound minimal to me.
Any order, the act goes on, must “be proportionate with the risk that the person poses to public health”. Given Victoria has a handful of cases every day, the risk most Victorians pose is zero.
It’s not just in Australia. Europe is supposedly big on human rights. I mean, they’re fearless warriors for the human rights of savages returning from their head-chopping holiday in the Caliphate. They just couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the human rights of millions of Europeans.
The impact of lockdowns lingers long after they have been lifted. Freedom House, a US-based think tank, recently found the pandemic had eroded civil rights in at least 80 countries, including the US, France, Belgium and Argentina. To be sure, many of these severe lockdown measures have been popular. But many stupid things have been popular: autarky, World War I and White Australia, to name a diverse few. It doesn’t make them right.
That’s why nations have had constitutions and bills of rights to limit democracies from bouts of collective insanity[…]
The Great Lockdown of 2020 illustrates how easily we can be spooked into a kind of health fascism, where basic individual rights are sacrificed to the greater health collective, without the slightest attempt at a justification, amid fearmongering propaganda and censorship. Anyone who wants to mind their own business and get on with life, making their own risk assessments, is vilified as selfish. Supporters of a police state and health fascism are seen as caring[…]
Many of the supposed public advocates for the poor, the young and marginal — unions, churches, the Australian Council of Social Service — have been quiet in defending their constituents’ core rights to work, to worship.
We are now obsessed with safety, above all else.
As many a would-be dictator has known, fear is perhaps the greatest lever to power there is.
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