By Paul Collits: The Freedoms Project. Featured Artist Alexander Schramm.
The once fine colony of South Australia was first established through a British Act of Parliament in 1834. It was once able to market itself as the free state; as they were the only state in Australia not to be established with the help of the “criminal dregs of British society” aka the convicts.
As noted by the Huffington Post:
South Australians have always prided themselves on having a “better” history than other colonies. The brag-worthy reasons were these:
1. SA was settled on rational economic principles;
2. SA was more progressive in terms of social and political development;
3. SA was settled by free people and no convicts.
This long established “fact” is now disputed with the discovery that two of the first police officers, in 1838, were in fact escaped convicts.
A little like Covid super-spreaders, perhaps. There may be some deeply ingrained South Australian urge to keep the riff-raff out.
The State was also a destination for sea traders from London and elsewhere. The famous sea shanty, “Bound for South Australia”, written around the 1880s, became an unofficial, popular anthem of the colony.
Oh South Australia is me home
Heave away! Heave away!
South Australia is me home
An’ we’re bound for South Australia.
Compared to Australia’s other police-run fiefdoms, South Australia has generally flown under the Covid madness radar. No public police thuggery and rubber bullets in the back, no beating up grandmothers and pregnant women, no Daniel Andrews, no dictatorial legislation, no Queensland-style forced Covid camps, (so far) no rounding up of remote Aboriginal community members, no Howard Springs. There has been Covid farce, however. And a mind-boggling absence of perspective and proportionality reflective of the manic, embedded zero-Covid ideology experienced in other Australasian jurisdictions.
First, there was the pizza outbreak in November 2020.
South Australia decided to enter a state-wide lockdown based on a lie told by a man with Covid-19 about his link to a pizza shop, police say.
But this would have been avoided if the man had told the truth, that he worked shifts at the shop, officials said.
He said he only went there to buy a pizza.
This misinformation prompted health officials to assume the man had caught the virus during a very brief exposure and that the strain must be a highly contagious one.
“To say I am fuming is an understatement,” state Premier Steven Marshall told reporters.
This affair was associated with a mere 36 cases. It led to a lockdown of the State slated for six days but ended abruptly after three, due to lack of interest from the virus.
Then there was the infamous “don’t touch the football” affair, when Australian Rules fans were warned not to dare touch the football if it came towards them; it having been touched by sweaty men.
South Australia’s Chief Health Officer, Nicola Spurrier, who likes a press conference as much as the rest of them, is actually a professor. She is also infamous for her observation that the virus doesn’t have legs – so everyone should stay still.
“This is the time to stay put. This is the time not to move around,” Professor Spurrier said. “The virus doesn’t have legs … if we stay put we will be able to get on top of it.”
This was just one in a litany of broken promises, from flattening the curve to a fortnight’s lockdown to downloading “the app” as the nation’s path to freedom, all proving to be false dawns in a blizzard of falsehoods.
It has become a Covid cliché to say, “you couldn’t make this up”. But you can’t. South Australia, especially is cursed with its choice of Chief Health Officer, many of whom proved life threatening to those around them as they made frantic dashes to get in front of the microphone.
Finally, there is now the case of a South Australian Senator, Alex Antic, a vigorous opponent of vaccine mandates and lockdowns, who was taken off to quarantine in a “medi-hotel” by police upon landing in Adelaide after the conclusion of Parliament in Canberra.
This is what happens to you if you stand up to the narrative and to the Covid class.
Antic is a conservative Liberal in a State run by so-called “Moderates” aka leftists who should not be parading as conservatives.
Some context is needed here. Since the initial outbreak of the Covid affair, South Australia has experienced four Covid deaths. That’s right. Four. And 952 “cases”. In over eighteen months. Currently Britain is experiencing many Covid cases – over 600,00 in the last two weeks of November, to be precise.
The United Kingdom has had 10.3 million cases and over 145,000 deaths. Thus, South Australia has no crisis whatsoever, certainly none that could possibly justify the establishment of a mini-police state.
British readers must continue to be taken by the breathtaking overreach of the State down under. We certainly are. To repeat a conclusion echoed by sensible thinkers around the globe, if it isn’t about public health, it must be about something else.
As the Opposition Leader in South Australia has recently opined, that State is not run by a Premier but by the Police Commissioner and the Chief Health Officer. Two less worthy unelected leaders one could scarcely find.
Which brings us to the persecution of one South Aussie medico. On the watch of a “Liberal” State Government, albeit a notoriously leftist one. The chilling case of Dr Bruce Paix has put South Australia on the Covid map again. Dr Paix had the temerity to contact a member of Parliament, who happens to be South Australia’s Acting Attorney General, about matters Covid. This politician, one Josh Teague, or someone in his office, it would seem, dobbed Paix in to the police who then paid him a visit. As reported by The Gateway Pundit:
Dr. Bruce Paix, a doctor of 32 years in South Australia is now unemployed due to “vaccine hesitancy.” Like Dr. Hobart, he too has been issuing exemptions for mask/vaccines and is a staunch critic against the COVID vaccine and lockdowns. He was recently visited by the police and threatened that he should stop contacting the MP to voice concerns about the COVID management policies.
The police claimed at first that they were there for a random firearms check but it turns out they were there for another reason.
He was advised to “tone down his emails” and “be careful what he writes”, as his communications were “drawing attention to him”. Soft, friendly police power. In reality, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Jaw-dropping stuff, even by Covid-world standards. Paix has attempted unsuccessfully to seek meetings with Teague. He is expressing his democratic rights in a system where the politicians are there to serve us, not the other way around. In a system where those alleging Covid totalitarianism are poo-pooed and countered with the spurious claim that “our politicians are democratically elected, so what are we whinging about?”
One concerned local observer in contact with TCW Defending Freedom has correctly called this episode out as an act of state intervention in the confidential doctor/patient relationship and the impact of this on citizens’ ability to give legally valid informed consent. This is yet another previously-assumed-to-be-sacrosanct principle of civil society simply trashed during the Covid affair. There is another “offence” seeming alleged against the doctor by the timorous politician involved here. It is the act of a citizen approaching his elected representative to simply seek a meeting, and to protest against a government policy.
Citizens are now being targeted by South Australia Police for the non-crime of letter writing.
This is cringeworthy behaviour by one clearly not fit to hold high public office. Isn’t an Attorney General meant to safeguard the rule of law and the rights of citizens? In a State now clearly turning into another thuggocracy.
Dr Paix has been responsible for a number of Covid crimes – he is a doctor who is unvaxxed, who therefore strays off message, he speaks out, and, perhaps worst of all, he is willing to give exemptions from the vaccines. He is paying for his thought-crime. There are currently few misdeeds greater for an Australian doctor than granting exemptions from the jab, and Dr Paix is far from being alone. It is the medical equivalent of an Australian corporate media journalist breaking ranks, or a politician from one of the major parties doing likewise. Doctors giving exemptions will quickly be swooped upon by their superiors, and threatened with being de-registered. The Victorian Government even changed the rules about exemptions to close off what it sees as “loopholes”. “Doctor shopping”.
As reported in October by The Age, in response to a swarm of exemption-seekers descending upon a country doctor that they perhaps knew was liberal on exemptions:
A spokesman for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and the Medical Board of Australia said while they were limited in being able to disclose whether they were investigating a particular individual, their message was clear: that vaccination is a crucial part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Public protection is our number one priority. When providing care, advice or sharing information online, registered health practitioners have a professional obligation to provide information that is evidence-based, in line with the best available health advice, and is consistent with public health messaging,” he said.
“Advising against vaccination unless there are evidence-based medical reasons undermines the national immunisation campaign and is not supported by the board.”
The spokesman urged any practitioner being asked to supply exemption certificates to know and understand the advice provided by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI).
He said the consequences of providing an exemption when it was not warranted could be significant, including being barred from providing exemptions or managing patients in relation to COVID-19 matters. They could also have their registrations suspended.
The bullying of doctors actually doing their jobs and taking “informed consent” seriously, apparently a minority, is yet another story all-but-totally ignored by the fourth estate.
The Australian Covid State has relied massively on third party collaboration for maintaining fear and hysteria and for enforcing Covid mandates. The corporate media, most notoriously, and the churches, to name but two of the most egregious examples.
The role of the medical establishment has been less publicised, but no less appalling. The case could be made that the behaviour of supine, self-regarding doctors, of all people, is way more appalling than that of all the other “just-following-orders” functionaries of Covid totalitarianism. The following examples are merely those that come most readily to mind:
- Bullying by doctors of patients to get the jab, whatever their personal medical circumstances;
- Gaslighting of the unvaccinated by office bearers of the Australian Medical Association, the doctors’ union, which only represents about one fifth of medical practitioners but packs a mean propaganda punch;
- Collaboration by doctors with government in refusing exemptions to patients who palpably deserve them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qA0wZD0iPw), or in making the already overly bureaucratic process of having exemptions confirmed all-but-impossible to overcome;
- Propagating lies about Covid and about those who question the official Covid narrative;
- Apart from a small minority, not speaking up and out against what Bret Weinstein has called the “medical tyranny” in Australia;
- Engaging in double think by refusing to grant exemptions to patients who need them yet simultaneously advising such patients that they are “prudent” in not getting jabbed, and/or saying they would not themselves vaccinate these patients;
- Getting into bed with Big Pharma;
- Making a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm”, for example by cheering on the vaccination of healthy youth, some of whom they know will die from the vaccines.
Dr Bruce Paix joins Dr Mark Hobart from Melbourne at the pointy end of the medical wars over Covid. They are deemed enemies of the Covid State, to be hunted down like the unvaccinated Aborigines of the outback, an appalling series of incidents now scandalising the globe.
Seven authorized officials from Australia’s Department of Health raided Dr Hobart’s surgery clinic in Sunshine North on Wednesday afternoon of the 10th of November and seized confidential patient files, an appointment book, and other documents after he refused to hand them over to the government.
Inevitably, Hobart is described as “controversial”, such is the embedded state of Covid ideology across the legacy media.
Their cases are merely the tip of a very large iceberg, however.
Bret Weinstein, who despite all of the Covid tyranny he has witnessed and reported on, was absolutely flabbergasted by the story of Betty Pezzimenti from Melbourne. The anecdotal, under-the-radar stories of bullying patients are legion.
What their AMA leaders say in public – “the unvaccinated will live very lonely and isolated lives” – they repeat in private. Australia’s doctors have been a disgrace to their profession. With very notable exceptions. Perhaps they have witnessed what happens to troublemakers like Doctors Paix and Hobart, and have decided to keep their heads well and truly down. They are on such a good career wicket, after all.
Would other Australians, now globally notorious for tolerating tyranny, for going along to get along, whatever the abhorrent behaviour witnessed, behave any differently? I don’t think so.
Paul Collits has worked in regional economic development analysis, policy and practice for more than 20 years in universities. His career has included research and analysis for governments at national, state and local levels. He publishes widely and has been one of Australia’s standouts during the Covid era, emerging as one of the most forceful, cogent and prolific writers of these benighted times.
Alexander Schramm was a native of Berlin, Germany, where he studied at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, In 1849 Schramm migrated to South Australia. He died of a tuberculosis at the age of 50 and was given a pauper’s funeral. To find out more about this fascinating artist go here. Much of his work has been lost. He was one of the few colonial artists whose work treated the indigenous people with sensitivity.
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