Bunyip aristocracy annoints its own

There is no doubt that the award of Companion in the Order of Australia (AC) to former premiers Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan is part of a campaign to justify and normalise the suspension of democratic processes, the rule of law, and the failure to cope with COVID perpetrated by all of our Australian governments over the period between 2020 and 2022, and later.

In a world where democratic countries seem to be mostly led by mediocre also-rans who templated policies from Communist China and ran their countries and economies into the ground over COVID, Australian leaders ran dead last.

Two Australian leaders in particular were worse than anyone else – Victorian Premier Andrews, and Western Australian Premier, McGowan.

Victoria was locked-down for 260 days, a world record, and police regularly breached civil liberties to enforce it. The hotel quarantine bungle alone cost 800 lives directly, but many more lives were unnecessarily lost indirectly as a result of unscientific COVID measures.

McGowan kept Western Australia locked-up like a “hermit kingdom” for 697 days with no one, apart from a few high-profile exceptions, being allowed to leave or enter the state. The one good thing to come from this were statistics proving beyond doubt the danger of the mRNA vaccines.

Because of its isolated state, there was no COVID in WA in 2020 or early 2021, so the huge number of adverse effects from mRNA vaccines could not be confused with COVID symptoms.

Image: WAVSS Annual Report 2021, with graphics by Rebekah Barnett sourced from https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/australias-top-honours-awarded-to

Andrews is the premier who campaigned to have tennis legend, Margaret Court, removed as a a Companion because he disagreed with her devoutly Christian view of homosexuality.

Now he is on the other end of a campaign for his honour to be revoked, even before the medal has even been pinned to his chest. Enjoy the schadenfreude, but this argument should not be a tit-for-tat, because the award damages our democracy.

Honours are awarded by a committee, hand-selected by the Commonwealth Government and the state governments. The states and territories each have one representative each, so their contribution is dominated by Labor administrations 7 to 1.

The federal government gets to appoint 8 “community representatives” which when the coalition was in power theoretically meant the council might lean the other way.

Since the last election the Albanese government has appointed 4 new community members to the committee, replacing 4 whose terms had expired, so the community members now are heavily skewed towards Labor administrations.

While the term “community representative” conjures up a picture of a jury of worthies who you might bump into any day at your corner store, in fact they’re rather more elevated than that. Only one is a male – establishment philanthropist Rupert Myer - and the rest encompass occupations like partner in KPMG (the government’s consultant of choice), trade unionist, former independent member of parliament now linked to the Teals, and professor of Muslim Studies.

The state’s representatives are almost all public servants, with two of them running their respective Department of Premier and Cabinet, one retiring from that position just two months ago, and another running her state’s public service.

That shows you how seriously the states treat these awards. And it couldn’t have hurt Dan Andrews that the former head of his Premier’s Department, Jeremi Moule, was on the council.

The council doesn’t decide who to consider, that is done by a nomination process, and anyone can be nominated. But that doesn’t mean they are powerless.

They do decide who to award, and what level of award they should bestow. This year there were 6 awards of the AC, 15 of the AO, 131 of the AM and 341 of the OAM, and the decision of which level to award lies solely with the council.

It’s extraordinary that McGowan and Andrews have received their rewards so quickly. It normally takes 2 years for a nomination to get through the process.

As public health was a criteria, it’s also strange the other state premiers in power at the time, particularly Gladys Berejiklian, whose state of New South Wales performed the best, weren’t awarded too.

It probably says something about how well-oiled their respective political operations are. Andrews and McGowan no doubt had their nominees in place right from the point of their resignation, if not before.

But that doesn’t mean the council has to accept a nomination, nor that they should give the highest award to the nominee.

Some premiers get the AC, but not all, and generally not until sometime after their term when any controversy around them has had a chance to die down.

In this case Andrews and McGowan are being rewarded for performance on COVID when there is a government inquiry running into our handling of it, as well as a Senate inquiry into excess deaths arising from it. Either could easily make adverse findings about either former premier.

In a properly run committee wouldn’t the chair see these high-profile nominations, call the committee together and discuss the potential ramifications for the perceived neutrality of the awards if they were to appear to be rushed through?

There is also no reason the nominee has to accept the award – Paul Keating could have been “Paul Keating AC” any number of times, but each time has declined. So Andrews and McGowan are both in on this, and should have had more discretion.

Or was the committee willing to leverage its perceived neutrality to push through a narrative on COVID with Andrews and McGowan as willing participants?

The second alternative appears to be the most likely.

When you go to the Australian Honours and Awards site the first entry under the menu item “Australian Honours and Awards” is COVID-19 Honour Roll, the list of which is replete with people who pushed government-backed misinformation all through the pandemic.

So ensuring the reputations of the incompetent appears to be on the top of the committee’s to do list.

It should also be noted that the former head of the TGA, Professor John Skerritt, received an AM in this birthday honours, and that former CHO of Queensland, Jeannette Young, was awarded an AC in 2022, again for services to public health, at a time when Australia was still in the tail end of the pandemic measures.

So the sandbagging is on. Even as the evidence of the damage done by our pandemic policies mounts the establishment is moving to elevate and protect some of those who did the most damage.

The affair also points to just how partially Labor manipulates what are supposed to be impartial civic organisations so that not even organisations that do important work, like the Reserve Bank, are safe.

While it might look like good politics in the short term, in the long run this behaviour undermines trust in the system, and without trust the system breaks down.

This is almost certainly not what Gough Whitlam had in mind when he dumped Australia’s “bunyip aristocracy” of dames and knights for an Australian system of honours almost 50 years ago in 1975.

It’s ironic that under his successors a new class appears to be emerging every bit as insular and establishment as the one he sought to dismantle where a band of courtiers dispenses honours to other courtiers, reinforcing and cementing in the ruling narrative.