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Bunyip aristocracy annoints its own

By Graham Young - posted Monday, 17 June 2024


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.

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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.

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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.

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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