The Dictator of Victoria has announced that as many as 1.25 million Victorian workers MUST get the Covid jabs or they will be forced out of their work. This is tyranny of the worst kind: either take the jabs whether you like it or not or lose your jobs, your livelihood, your income and your ability to feed your families.
As one news report puts it:
By Friday, October 15, every authorised worker in Victoria will need to have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine if they want to continue attending their workplace. Premier Daniel Andrews announced the change on Friday, saying the public health advice was a response to the record 1438 number of COVID cases on Thursday. The authorised workers will need to have their second dose by November 26. Mr Andrews said the new rule would cover about 1.25 million Victorians, most of whom had already had at least one vaccination.
This is monstrous. Yet plenty of clowns fully drowned in leftist panic and hysteria will still stupidly argue that there is choice here. Baloney – there is NO choice at all whatsoever in this. What we have is the sort of totalitarian coercion that we have seen in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China. ‘You WILL do as the State dictates, or you will lose everything.’
Telling people that they must take a foreign substance into their body or lose the right to work and look after their loved ones is the height of authoritarian evil. There are many ways this can be challenged, but let me mention two: legal and moral.
This demand by Andrews simply opens up a huge can of legal worms. It is doubtful if it can stand. Let me very briefly refer to one very important legal discussion on this: the dissenting opinion by Fair Work Commission Deputy President Lyndall Dean on vaccines and ‘medical apartheid’.
The lengthy minority opinion by Dean must be carefully read and digested, and I will need to speak more to this in the near future. But here I can offer a few quotes from her dissenting opinion:
[105] The stated position of the Australian Government is that the vaccine is voluntary. On 21 July 2021, the Prime Minister in a media conference stated that “people make their own decisions about their own health and their own bodies. That’s why we don’t have mandatory vaccination in relation to the general population”.
[106] On 13 August 2021, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Business Council of Australia (BCA) issued a joint statement on mandatory COVID vaccinations in which it acknowledged the Australian Government’s COVID vaccination policy that the vaccine is voluntary, and confirmed the views of the BCA and ACTU that “for the overwhelming majority of Australians, your work or workplace should not fundamentally alter the voluntary nature of vaccination”.
[107] The Fair Work Ombudsman has publicly stated that employers will need to have a “compelling reason” before requiring vaccinations, and that “the overwhelming majority of employers should assume that they can’t require their employees to be vaccinated against coronavirus”.
[108] Safe Work Australia has publicly stated that “most employers will not need to make vaccinations mandatory to meet their [health and safety] obligations”.
[109] Despite this, many employers are declaring they will mandate COVID vaccines for their workers, and PHOs are being made by State Governments, in circumstances where there is no justification for doing so.
Mandatory vaccination cannot be justified
[110] COVID vaccinations, in accordance with the Australian Government’s policy, must be freely available and voluntary for all Australians.
[111] Mandatory COVID vaccinations, however, cannot be justified in almost every workplace in Australia. While there are numerous reasons for this, this decision will focus on:
a) the requirement for freely given and informed consent for medical procedures;
b) denying an unvaccinated person the ability work on health and safety grounds, whether at the initiation of an employer or as part of a PHO; and
c) the requirements to comply with disability discrimination laws.
I was going to also look at ethical and moral reasons why mandatory vaccinations are wrong. I was going to quote from a number of human rights and medical ethics documents from the past 75 years that say this very thing. But I see that Dean covered most of the ones I was going to, so let me quote more from her. She begins by looking at the 1947 Nuremberg Code, and goes on to say this:
[119] Informed and freely given consent is at the heart of the Code and is rightly viewed as a protection of a person’s human rights.
[120] The United Nations, including through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first proclaimed in 1948, has long recognised the right to bodily integrity.
[121] The Declaration of Helsinki (the Declaration), made in 1964 by the World Medical Association, is also a statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. Under the heading of “Informed Consent”, the Declaration starts with the acknowledgement that “Participation by individuals capable of giving informed consent as subjects in medical research must be voluntary”.
[122] Australia is a party to the seven core international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
[123] The Australian Human Right Commission Act 1986 (Cth) gives effect to Australia’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides in Article 7 that “…no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation”.
[124] In 1984, the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists (AAICJ) held an international colloquium in Siracusa, Italy, which was co-sponsored by the International Commission of Jurists. The focus of the colloquium was the limitation and derogation provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the outcome is a document that is referred to as the Siracusa Principles 22.
[125] The introductory note to the Siracusa Principles commences in the following terms:
“It has long been observed by the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists (AAICJ) that one of the main instruments employed by governments to repress and deny the fundamental rights and freedoms of peoples has been the illegal and unwarranted Declaration of Martial Law or a State of Emergency. Very often these measures are taken under the pretext of the existence of a “public emergency which threatens the life of a nation” or “threats to national security”.
The abuse of applicable provisions allowing governments to limit or derogate from certain rights contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has resulted in the need for a closer examination of the conditions and grounds for permissible limitations and derogations in order to achieve an effective implementation of the rule of law. The United Nations General Assembly has frequently emphasised the importance of a uniform interpretation of limitations on rights enunciated in the Covenant.”
[126] Paragraph 58 of the Siracusa Principles under the heading of Non-Derogable Rights provides:
No state party shall, even in time of emergency threatening the life of the nation, derogate from the Covenant’s guarantees of the right to life; freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and from medical or scientific experimentation without free consent; freedom from slavery or involuntary servitude; the right not be be imprisoned for contractual debt; the right not to be convicted or sentenced to a heavier penalty by virtue of retroactive criminal legislation; the right to recognition as a person before the law; and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. These rights are not derogable under any conditions even for the asserted purpose of preserving the life of the nation.
[127] This is consistent with Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
[128] Australia’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 23 confirms that consent is a fundamental requirement for participation in any clinical trial, and that “no person should be subject to coercion or pressure in deciding whether to participate” in a clinical trial. Further, the Australian Government’s Consumer Guide to Clinical Trials24 also confirms that participation in a clinical trial is voluntary, and states “it is important that you never feel forced to take part in a trial”.
She concludes:
[180] The statements by politicians that those who are not vaccinated are a threat to public health and should be “locked out of society” and denied the ability to work are not measures to protect public health. They are not about public health and not justified because they do not address the actual risk of COVID. These measures can only be about punishing those who choose not to be vaccinated. If the purpose of the PHOs is genuinely to reduce the spread of COVID, there is no basis for locking out people who do not have COVID, which is easily established by a rapid antigen test. Conversely, a vaccinated person who contracts COVID should be required to isolate until such time as they have recovered.
[181] Blanket rules, such as mandating vaccinations for everyone across a whole profession or industry regardless of the actual risk, fail the tests of proportionality, necessity and reasonableness. It is more than the absolute minimum necessary to combat the crisis and cannot be justified on health grounds. It is a lazy and fundamentally flawed approach to risk management and should be soundly rejected by courts when challenged.
[182] All Australians should vigorously oppose the introduction of a system of medical apartheid and segregation in Australia. It is an abhorrent concept and is morally and ethically wrong, and the anthesis of our democratic way of life and everything we value.
[183] Australians should also vigorously oppose the ongoing censorship of any views that question the current policies regarding COVID. Science is no longer science if a person is not allowed to question it.
[184] Finally, all Australians, including those who hold or are suspected of holding “anti-vaccination sentiments”, are entitled to the protection of our laws, including the protections afforded by the Fair Work Act. In this regard, one can only hope that the Majority Decision is recognised as an anomaly and not followed by others.
Please read her entire statement. It is powerful stuff indeed. No one who is committed to ethical and legal uprightness can possibly support this latest tyrannical mandate from Australia’s most authoritarian ruler. It must be opposed 100 per cent.
