By Paul Collits
There is danger in writing an article on Covid’s Australian Passing Parade. You just know there will be more perpetrators of Australia’s disastrous Covid overreach tip-toeing from the wreckage almost before you press “send” to the editor.
The execrable Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan, who kept his state cut off from the rest of the world for more than 600 days and went to extreme lengths to get the entire population, including the indigenous, vaccinated.
Barely a fortnight later, Victoria has lost its Covid point man, the resigning Chief Health Officer and former earring-wearing reality TV star, Brett Sutton.
Victoria’s Chief Health Officer is a regular at the state’s daily coronavirus press conferences – but it isn’t his first time in front of the camera.
Sutton is moving to CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an organisation that has been lying about climate change for at least two decades. The new job could well mean a move to Canberra, where his brother Trevor, a senior official at the Australian Bureau of Statistics and his sister-in law Jane Halton, Australia’s “corona queen” and Bill Gates’ vaccinator-girl down under, reside. Canberra’s power couple.
As Mark Antony might have said, I come here to bury Sutton, not to praise him. But the strangely appealing, to some at least, public servant has earned the plaudits of the leftist media branch of the Covid Class. To them, he is a hero. Like all of the others to have experienced a soft landing. So, before we come to Sutton’s actual record, let us sample the hagiography.
One of The Guardian’s drooling females headlined the following: “Farewell Brett Sutton, the silver fox chief health officer Victorians couldn’t keep their eyes off.”
Not content with this opening, she continued: “Like a superhero in an open-necked shirt and a vaguely sexy beard, he emerged during the Covid crisis to keep us safe. And now he’s gone!”
A cold shower for the lady, please.
It gets worse:
The rise of Brett Sutton: Sex Symbol came shortly after we all noticed Dan Andrews had developed crazy eyes from weeks of perpetual hypervigilance. As a sidekick, Sutton had it all: hair, open collars, evidence of employment. He was the Robin to Andrews’ Batman. The Donkey to his Shrek. The Piglet to his Pooh.
After that, I had to stop reading. Another Guardianista female chimed in: ‘It nearly crushed me’: Brett Sutton resigns as Victoria’s chief health officer.
Well, it nearly crushed us too, matey.
Then there is The Age: Book extract: On a perfect autumn day, Brett Sutton sat on the couch in tears. It was his first big call.
Book extract! That’s all we need.
The Sutton-related book referred to is called Life as We Knew It by Aisha Dow of The Age.
For a far more reliable read, I recommend any of John Stapleton’s books on the Covid disaster, for example his latest, Australia Breaks Apart, or see him on Nick Cater’s Battleground program on ADH TV.
Next, Malcolm Fraser’s signature creation, the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service or SBS, created to encourage the Australian population to accept mass migration and the government’s diversity mantra: “Brett Sutton became an unlikely viral sensation during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he has joined a wave of leaders to the global disease response stepping down from their roles.
“Professor Sutton became Victoria’s chief health officer in 2019 and spearheaded the state’s policy on coronavirus, appearing on television daily and gaining fans that dedicated calendars, mugs and book clubs to his image.”
The SBS revealed Sutton’s new role: “Professor Sutton will take up a new role as director of health and biosecurity at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.”
Director of biosecurity? That sounds a tad ominous, next pandemic-wise. But he probably won’t have much say in that. The World Health Organisation will be in charge of us all by then. He will be just another front man. What might he be researching at CSIRO? How to get mRNA vaccines to market even faster than last time? How to cover up fake clinical trials? How to get more funding for gain-of-function research? Even better nudging techniques? How to adapt lockdowns to climate change? How to plug the few remaining gaps in the panopticon?
The SBS’s idiosyncratic take on the resignations of Ardern – yet another to have gone – Sutton and Mark McGowan focused on the issue of “exhaustion”. Those of us who lost our careers, our businesses, in some cases our families and friends, and in other cases our lives and our health, as a direct result of the actions and words of these people are clearly less important that the “exhaustion” of members of the Covid criminal class.
Brett Sutton has stepped down as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, adding to the list of political leaders and officials who spearheaded the pandemic response but have now left the political arena. SBS.
Then there’s this absurdity in miniature:
“He brought a … reassuring, measured response that I think overwhelmingly endeared him to Victorians,” former Health minister Martin Foley told ABC Melbourne radio.
Anyone who thinks that Victoria’s response to Covid was “measured” needs counselling urgently.
Even the Chinese Communist Party thought that Australia – let alone Victoria – was going too far. Reassuring? Sutton was reassuring the people of Victoria of the need for a hysterical response to a minor virus. “Reassuring” is only virtuous when the truth is being spoken. Otherwise, it is dangerously, indeed, fatally, misleading. People have been jailed for far less.
Here is Foley again:
“He always spoke truth to power”.
To which “power” did Sutton speak “truth”, I wonder. There was no countervailing power in Australia to stand up to the Covid State. As for truth, well, see again under Pants-on-Fire Albanese, Scott Morrison, Brittany Higgins and Lisa Wilkinson. I guess it is hardly surprising that truth has lost just about all of its currency in public life when everyone from birth up is taught that truth is relative. You know, your truth and my truth.
The $1.2 billion taxpayer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation called Sutton “Victoria’s Covid guardian”.
Chief health officer Brett Sutton closes the chapter on his time as Victoria’s COVID guardian. ABC.
“Guardian” is defined as: A person who protects or defends something.
Well, Sutton and his peers, like Kerry Chant in New South Wales and Jeannette Young, now comfortably well off after being appointed as Governor of Queensland, did not protect us from a virus from which we did not need much protection.
No, they ditched half a century of settled science on lockdowns and masks, and allowed us to be exposed to dangerous non-vaccines that they all insisted we take. They had us lining up for boosters that almost no one takes and which are no longer even recommended. They had us lining up for “tests” that were not even fit for purpose. They appeared day after day on our TV screens, spouting lies. They supported and helped created the mass hysteria which overtook the country.
Activist Monica Smit of Reignite Democracy Australia, one of the more talented political activists to emerge during the era and who, for her pains, spent almost a month in prison, has a slightly different take on our Brett.
“Rest assured – I take what he has done to all of us very personally and have a plan to make an example of him! These things take time, but we won’t forget.”
It was his actions that tore our state apart and landed me in prison. If he thinks he can resign and leave it all behind him…HE’S SORELY MISTAKEN!
Well said, Monica.
One of the nation’s most reviled politicians, Craig Kelly is on the same page, and adds to the list of indictments: “Brett Sutton was an active combatant in the War Against Ivermectin.
“Sutton, together with all those that fought to demonise Ivermectin or deny sick Australians access to this medicine, have blood on their hands.
“And it was Sutton’s misinformation about the vaccines that gave cover to the brutal & criminal conduct of the Victorian Police to bash Victorians and even shoot rubber bullets into the backs of fleeing protestors in a public park.
“Sutton and all the other State & Federal Chief Medical Officers that ignored the science, the data and the evidence – and just parroted from the marketing brochures of the vaccine sellers must be held to account.”
Craig Kelly was one of the very, very few – the only one from either major party save for Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic and George Christensen – to be speaking “truth to power”. Sutton certainly wasn’t. He simply got caught up in the daily excitement of a public policy crisis, as all people who experience their one and only fifteen minutes of fame period do. And he got everything he did horribly wrong. Everything he said, everything he advised, was disastrously wrong. One hundred and eighty degrees wrong. And he gave cover, plausible deniability, to Daniel Andrews. Day after day during the longest lockdown in the world.
One unkind observer on the Twittersphere had this to say of Sutton:
Dictator Dan’s utterly unaccountable, black shirt pretty boy Brett Sutton – currently being humanised by Kerry Stokes’ lockdown propagandists.
Just as well he has friends in low media places. Not to mention the fact checker industrial complex. Just try putting “Brett Sutton says vaccines don’t stop covid transmission” into a search engine and see how you go. Even though he did, in August 2022.
Despite two, three, four doses of the vaccine, ah, it’s not so good at preventing infection in the first place. So we are getting infected, that’s why we’ve had tens of thousands of cases in this wave.
Sounds pretty clear to me. Unless Twitter and YouTube have found Brett’s body double.
This was a massive backdown, a massive admission of error, said with a straight face and dutifully covered up by the ABC and all the fact checkers. Tell the big lie. Rinse. Repeat. This is the hymn sheet of the Covid and post-Covid media, and the whole damned political class.
Paul Collits is an Australian freelance writer and independent researcher. He publishes widely across a number of Australia’s leading publications and has been one of the country’s single most cogent commentators throughout the Covid era. He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines – politics, geography and planning and business studies. A collection of his writing published in A Sense of Place Magazine can be found here. He posts regularly on Substack here.
