Alison Bevege: Letters from Australia
Bureaucracy is destroying Democracy as unelected regulators take power from parliamentary lawmakers.
The shock judgement on Thursday against Australians injured by the covid vaccines has revealed a deadly chasm between the public and an unaccountable bureaucracy, on the eve of a federal election.
Federal Court Justice Anna Katzmann’s interlocutory ruling on the covid vaccine class action was scathing, ripping into an “incomprehensible” statement of claim that at one point ballooned to over 1000 pages, as reported here.
Some may blame the lawyers, but even the finest legal team in Australia may be unable to hold any individual in the bureaucracy to account, even when an agency’s decisions maim or kill people.
Without commenting on the specifics of the case, which is ongoing, this reveals a growing problem of accountability in governance.
The laws have been written in such a way as to shield the bureaucracy from all consequences of their actions, leaving them – and their identities – insulated from liability.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which approved the covid gene-vaccines is protected by Section 61a of the Therapeutic Goods Administration Act 1989 which gives immunity from civil actions to the Commonwealth or its “protected persons” unless their actions can be proven to be “in bad faith”.
Bad faith is the exercise of power for an improper motive, and the absence of an honest attempt to perform the functions of the office – so you have to prove intent, which is nearly impossible.
The warning signs were revealed in 2017 by journalist Joanne McCarthy, after scores of women were hideously injured by Johnson & Johnson’s horrific pelvic mesh implants and a Senate inquiry was held into the scandal.
The implants were approved by the TGA without independent evidence of safety and efficacy, gynaecologist Professor Christopher Maher told the inquiry.
University of Canberra academic Wendy Bonython and associate professor Bruce Arnold called for the inquiry to investigate indemnity provisions that protect the TGA from being sued for negligent performance of its regulatory functions, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“The TGA can’t be sued for negligence. It doesn’t matter how negligent the regulator, it can get away with it, which is problematic because it removes any incentive towards carefulness,” Dr Bonython told the SMH.
In 2019 the victims won a class action against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Ethicon, negotiating a $300 million settlement, in a case heard by the exact same Justice Katzmann who delivered the crushing judgement in the Covid Vaccine Class Action.
Notice that even though it was the TGA who authorised the mesh implants without independent evidence they were safe, Shine Lawyers did not try to sue the TGA, only the manufacturer. They appear to be untouchable.
That is why the Morrisson Government’s secret billion-dollar contracts for the covid vaccines that gave legal indemnity to the drug companies is so devastating.
It removed what might be the only practical avenue of legal redress.
The injured are valiantly trying to hold the government and the TGA to account, and the case is ongoing – but without commenting on the specifics of the case, the bureacracy in general has shielded itself with an impenetrable wall of legislation.
The courts act as an important check on the power of government, giving citizens an avenue of redress. If no redress is possible because governments have passed laws to prevent it, then what does that mean for our future?
Health Minister Greg Hunt made it all worse in 2017
Another problem raised at the 2017 Senate inquiry was that the TGA was too close to industry and that the regulatory framework completely bypassed consumers in favour of drug companies.
Instead of fixing this problem, then-Health Minister Greg Hunt made it worse.
Hunt, a named respondent in the Covid Vaccine Class Action, is also the one who moved a Bill before the Parliament in 2017, creating the “provisional approval” pathway for novel drugs.
This became law in 2018 allowing the TGA to approve drugs for the market with only preliminary data, watering down safety standards.
This exact provisional pathway was used to rush the covid vaccines to the public.
Killing up to 100,000 Australians
The TGA’s decision to allow poorly-tested covid gene-vaccines onto the market has killed and maimed an unknown number of Australians.
Thirty five people dropped dead the day they got the shot, according to the TGA’s own figures, forced out of it by Freedom of Information Act request 25-0047.
A further 52 people died the next day.
Another 59 died the day after that.
There were 38 deaths on day three, 44 deaths on day four, 35 deaths on day five, 22 deaths on day six, and 19 deaths on day 7.
That is 304 deaths within the first week of injection. Almost half the reported deaths, or 453, were in the first two weeks. No autopsies were done looking for vaccinal spike, the TGA did not even mention it.
The TGA claims only 14 deaths are “linked to” the covid shots out of 1039 fatalities listed on the “time to death” spreadsheet despite no autopsies and more than 300 deaths occurring within a week of injection.
Regulatory expert Phillip Altman, who liaised between drug companies and the TGA for more than 30 years, told Senator Malcolm Roberts in a Rumble interview (from 02.10.00 on), that the TGA’s monitoring system is so under-reported that the death toll is likely to be as high as 100,000.
“It’s absolutely astounding. I’m a different person now. I was a different person in 2019. I was a Big Pharma guy … I had no idea of the degree of regulatory capture that was ongoing,” he said.
“Seeing what i’m seeing now is something that I would never of dreamt in my life to ever witness and it is so difficult for me to look back and see how blinded I was. I was in the system and I couldn’t see it.”
How the TGA is compromised
The exact same agency responsible for approving the killer shots, the TGA, is also responsible for counting up the deaths and injuries from the shots that they approved – a clear conflict of interest.
They don’t want a huge number of deaths and injuries attributed to a product they approved.
Another conflict of interest is that more than 90 percent of TGA funding comes from the pharmaceutical manufacturers it regulates.
The libertarians who want to defund government should consider that a regulatory agency funded by industry instead of taxpayers produces outcomes that kill people.
Another conflict is the revolving door from government agencies to industry which may encourage public servants to regulate with an eye to their future careers.
Revolving door: Skerritt
Professor John Skerritt, one of the named respondents in the Covid Vaccine Class Action, was directly responsible for the TGA, as its head. He was appointed to the board of Big Pharma lobby group Medicines Australia in December 2023 after leaving the TGA.
Medicines Australia lobbies on behalf of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the very companies whose products the TGA approved for covid.
In May last year he co-wrote regulatory recommendations on mRNA platform technology with Moderna employee Carolyn Tucek-Szabo, in a paper funded by Moderna, whose mRNA product the TGA approved for covid.
Skerritt was Deputy Secretary Health Products Regulation Group at the Department of Health until April 2023, spent 11 years at the TGA which he headed during the covid panic.
Revolving door: Halton
Former head of the Department of Health Jane Halton (2002 to 2014), is another high-level public servant who now serves the mRNA interests that it is the role of the Health Department and its subsidiary the TGA to regulate.
Halton became founding CEPI chair in 2018, and was re-elected to another five-year term in 2021.
CEPI’s mission is to push the mRNA gene-vaccine platform at the highest international levels as a 100-day countermeasure for emerging infectious diseases.
She is co-chair of the COVAX facility, co-founded by CEPI. COVAX takes billions in taxes from developed nations (including Australia) to buy gene-vaccines from Big Pharma for poor countries. This expands the gene-vaccine market under the guise of charity and “equitable access”.
Born in the UK, Halton spent 33 years at the highest levels of the public service, going from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to head the Department of Health until 2014, then the Department of Finance until 2016. She is married to Trevor Sutton, Australian Bureau of Statistics deputy statistitian from 2009 to 2017 when he retired.
Both Halton and Sutton advised the Federal Government as consultants during the covid panic. The Federal Government put Professor Halton in charge of the independent review of Australia’s covid vaccine and treatment procurement in 2022, in a clear conflict of interest with her CEPI role as a promoter of mRNA gene-vaccines.
Her review made eight recommendations that encouraged more gene-vaccine purchasing, including that Australia should encourage booster uptake in 2024 with public health campaigns, make partnerships with industry, buy more Moderna mRNA so children under five have access, and to consider making the pandemic removal of “regulatory burden” permanent.
People are politics: who makes the decisions?
The Covid Vaccine Class Action has tried to hold five parties responsible for the covid vaccine disaster:
- Brendan Murphy, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Aged Care;
- John Skerritt, former head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) Deputy Secretary Health Products Regulation Group;
- Paul Kelly, Australia’s former chief medical officer;
- Greg Hunt, former federal health minister;
- The Commonwealth Government.
The Australian Government Solicitors successfully argued that none of the decisions to approve the vaccines were made by Murphy, Skerritt, Hunt and Kelly anyway.
Justice Katzmann said: “It is evident … that the applicants do not know who approved the vaccines”.
So who can be held to account at the TGA if not Murphy, who – as barrister Julian Gillespie has pointed out, was the one with the authority to approve the covid products under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989. The Act does indeed specify the Secretary as being the one who “must decide to make, or to refuse to make, the determination”.
Why is it that Skerritt may not also be held to account, when his own former government profile said he had “direct responsibility for both the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Office of Drug Control”.
The Mandarin, to whom he gave an interview, reported him as being directly “involved in vaccine approvals” during the covid pandemic.
If you can’t identify the relevant parties then how can they be held to account?
This is a problem with Australia’s increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy which is shielding itself with anonymity, obfuscating exactly who is responsible.
Here is Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick, standing for re-election in a new party, People First, asking Health Department bureaucrats whether or not the TGA has a duty of care to Australians when they approve medications (in general, not in reference to the case) they are unable to answer, saying it has a “specific legal meaning”.
The TGA itself says it is responsible for allowing vaccines to be used in Australia, and is informed by the advice of the Advisory Committee on Vaccines (ACV).
The ACV members are appointed by the Health Minister (which was Greg Hunt, named in the lawsuit).
The members for 2021, can’t be seen on Google now, only the 2022 members are available on Wayback. They are: Jim Buttery, Jeanine Bygott, Madeline Hall, Kristine Macartney, Ines Rio, Vicky Sheppeard, Adrienne Torda, Joseph Torresi, and Diane Walsh.
We can’t know who the key decision makers might have been among them.
Then there is ATAGI, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation which also advises the Health Minister on the administration of vaccines.
It’s ATAGI who advised that everyone over age 12 could inject mRNA vaccines for covid, when healthy children were at zero risk, that mix and match is fine, inject it regularly even if you already had covid.
ATAGI has around 15 voting members. In 2021, ATAGI had a Covid-19 working group which also advised the ACV. The members have been scrubbed from the Government’s website but Wayback has an archived copy. The executive group were: Christopher Blythe and Allen Cheng (co-chairs), Katie Flanagan, Robyn Gibbs, Nigel Crawford, Kristine Macartney, Lisa Schofield, Nick Henderson, and Hope Peisley.
The vaccine safety, evaluation, monitoring and confidence Subgroup 3 were: Nigel Crawford (lead), Allen Cheng, Margie Danchin (behavioural science and risk communication), Paul Effler, Cheryl Jones, John Kaldor, Tony Korman, Alan Leeb, Debra Petrys (consumer representative who bravely warned about AstraZeneca for under-50s and was attacked for it), Diane Walsh – plus, last of all, an unnamed TGA representative listed for “vaccine pharmacovigilance”.
To have policy made or advice given by anonymous bureaucrats is disastrous. They must be accountable. We must know the decision tree – but Permanent Canberra is increasingly hiding this.
The Health Department, shielded from accountability, still says on its website to repeatedly inject the covid products.
The large advisory group of people at ATAGI spreads out responsibility for bad advice and obfuscates exactly who is to blame.
The deliberations of the meetings were confidential, so we cannot know who was recklessly pushing the gene-based products and who urged caution.
If the mRNA-pushers go on to plum roles in pharmaceutical firms then nobody will hold them to account, because we won’t know who it was.
Neither Labor, Liberals, the Greens or the Teals are interested in an accountable Health Department.
Here is One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts asking Labor Senator Malarndirri McCarthy if she would review the legal position of the TGA with regard to malfeasance in office through willful ignorance of harms from the pharmaceutical products they promote (from 28:20 on)
Her reply: “I reject outright your question in that regard and I’m sure the government does have great faith in the TGA”.
Only the minor parties are trying to hold the agency to account: Senator Gerard Rennick (People First, Qld), Malcolm Roberts (One Nation, Qld), Craig Kelly (Libertarians, NSW), Clive Palmer (Trumpet of Patriots, Qld) as well as rogue Liberals Member for Monash Russell Broadbent (Vic) and SA Senator Alex Antic.
Your electorate might have a hidden gem, a new candidate that will really work hard for us voters – but you have to actively try to find out who is in your patch, and help them if they are any good. It’s up to us.
Censorship bureau is hiding its bureaucrats, too
Even more secretive than the Health Department is Australia’s disgraced censorship bureau, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
ACMA tried to get repressive “misinformation” censorship laws passed to control everything you can see, hear or say on the internet, setting itself up as the judge of truth, then forcing Big Tech platforms to do their censorship for them.
An eSafety Commissioner was created to “keep you safe” and censor “hate-speech”, staffed by American Julie Inman-Grant.
Ms Inman-Grant, who has a Wikispooks entry and is almost certainly connected to the Democrat faction of the US spy state, was a former Twitter and Microsoft employee who tried to censor Twitter after Elon Musk bought it turned it into free speech X.
The eSafety Commissioner is an independent statutory office but the staff are all ACMA, so in practice eSafety is part of ACMA.
It was the eSafety Commissioner who censored Australian show Cafe Locked Out, which featured covid-injured interviews by Australian playwright Michael Gray Griffith. Mr Griffith found out about the censorship through a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request.
The eSafety office is advised by an eSafety Advisory Committee, which formed in 2020 and met through to early 2023, advising through the covid-era censorship.
But you cannot find out who these people are. That’s a secret.
An unelected government regulator is censoring you on the advice of a secret committee, and you cannot know who the advisors’ names are, even though their own website states that the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requires them to publish information including “who we are including our structure”.
I tried to FOI them, but they refused to name names, saying it would unreasonably chew up their resources to individually ask permission from “more than 20 third parties”.
Why would they have to ask permission? If you’re advising a government agency on censorship you forfeit your right to anonymity, one would think. If you don’t want to be accountable and named, then don’t be an advisor. But that’s not how eSafety rolls.
“This information is not well known, the relevant people are not known to be associated with the Committee and the information is not publicly accessible … Based in my inquiries, the representatives on the Committee were not advised that their identities would be made public, and the established practice of eSafety was to report on the activities of the Committee without naming the individuals involved,” wrote an unnamed “Manager, legal services – business operations” at the eSafety’s FOI email. Could you get any more East Germany than that?
Even though the ACMA website says they must state who they are, they get around this by outsourcing the advising to be “not part of the structure of the agency”
You can only know their organisations. The FOI response said they include: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok, Twitter, four universities, seven government departments including Home Affairs, Prime Minister & Cabinet and DFAT, a couple of charities and the Communications Alliance (which represents Big Tech firms, television service providers and IT providers).
Canberra Bureaucracy is destroying Australian Democracy
Permanent Canberra doesn’t like being told what to do or questioned by elected politicians. That is the culture in Canberra. They despise the general public and think we are all idiots.
Look at the attitude to Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts asking Health Department bureaucrats about the Yale study that found covid vaccine spike protein in the bodies of victims more than 700 days after injection, as reported by former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson.
They refuse to accept the possibility that the evidence from the Yale study might be valid, because the study is a pre-print. Even though it replicates findings from other studies that were peer-reveiwed. They refuse even to consider it.
They re-explain their roles like frustrated teachers with a dense child, backing each other up. Listen to the huge frustrated sigh at 27:00 as Senator Roberts asks if the bacterial DNA contamination left by the manufacturing process can integrate into the human genome.
Increasingly the TGA likes to spread responsibility to the international regulators, such as the Gates-influenced ICMRA, putting out that global body’s statement on covid vaccine safety as if it were their own. Then they appeal to a global consensus to defend their decisions. For more on ICMRA see this piece here.
Unelected agencies are increasingly making the regulations we live under, usurping the role of elected law-makers who are accountable to the voters.
ACMA tried to expand its powers with the Misinformation censorship bill and was beaten back, but they will try again.
Medical regulator AHPRA silenced doctors and other health professionals during the covid panic by threatening their licenses – then ruthlessly ruined the careers of good practitioners who spoke out against the mRNA products.
The Voice referendum tried to set up a new unaccountable agency under the guise of being nice to indigenous people, that would have had unknown powers with unknown staff. Voters wisely rejected it.
The Trump election was a backlash against a US bureaucracy that had been running things for decades with the President just for show. The Biden presidency was as irrelevant and ceremonial as the British Royal Family. Everyone could see he wasn’t in charge.
Trump, for good or ill, is refusing to be ceremonial. He is a company CEO giving the orders and sacking staff who won’t carry them out. That’s OK – the voters elected him to do this, and he is imposing his will on the bureaucracy, with great difficulty.
We need our politicians to make our bureaucracy accountable to us, and to take the legislative power back.
We can be careful in this election to number the boxes properly so we don’t accidentally vote for major party grifters due to preferences. This is our chance to put the major parties, the fake Greens, the commies and the Teals last. Don’t waste it.
Alison Bevege is one of the very best of a new breed of Australian journalists who have come to prominence since 2020, forged in the fire of Covid repression and outrageous censorship. She previously wrote for News Ltd, Reuters and Daily Mail. She became a bus driver for the pandemic instead of being locked down working from home — and discovered she liked it. An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. Forgotten in the Australia of today.
You can follow her excellent work on her Substack page HERE.
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