There has never been a time when Acton’s and Madison’s warnings about the abuse of power and the danger of dictatorship have been more relevant to the world’s oldest continuing democracies, especially Australia and America. When the Wuhan virus struck, Australia’s leaders ignored world’s best practice, guided instead by notoriously failed modelling as well as the panic ignited by that propaganda arm of the Democrats, America’s mainstream media. For them the Wuhan virus has replaced Russian collusion as their principal weapon to stop Trump from draining their swamp. Our politicians’ solution to the virus was blunt and crude. It was to accelerate their wanton destruction of Australia’s economy. They began this long ago by calling a halt to water harvesting and transferring manufacturing to communist China while increasing immigration but only into congested cities, making it next to impossible for the young to fulfil the Australian dream and buy a house. They followed this with their quasi-religious conversion to global warming, which teaches the delusion that people can and must change the climate. Imposing massive increases in electricity costs, they have now put the last nail into Australian manufacturing. Rather than being just barnacles on the nation, the politicians are now turning into petty dictators. The hallmark of a dictatorship is the Stalinist decision to deny citizens the universally recognised right to leave their country.

Because the National Cabinet has no place in the Constitution, its decisions are effected by ministers making subordinate legislation, often without even viceregal scrutiny. Exercising a power under the Biosecurity Act ‘to prevent or control the spread’ of the virus ‘to another country’, the Health Minister on 25 March decreed that an Australian citizen ‘must not leave Australian territory as a passenger’ without satisfying some faceless bureaucrat that he or she has a ‘compelling reason’ to leave. The reasons are narrowed down on the official website. Officials and business people apart, ‘compelling reasons’ are limited to medical treatment not available in Australia or on compassionate or humanitarian grounds. According to reports, these take time and are rarely granted. This almost blanket ban on travelling is beyond the narrow power parliament gave the minister to stop the spread of the virus to another country. This is a funnel the size of which constrains the minister, whatever the National Cabinet wants, to make subordinate legislation of no greater width. He could have quite properly required that people leaving be tested. But like a Stalinist state, you can’t leave without the agreement of some faceless bureaucrat. This tyrannical requirement could be as much an actionable misfeasance in public office as was the Gillard government’s unnecessary and legally unjustifiable total ban on the export of live cattle to Indonesia. This is but one example of ministers wielding powers unnecessarily and capriciously restricting Australians in the exercise of their fundamental rights, including the common law rights to carry on a business, to work and to move around freely. Power has gone to the politicians’ heads.

In addition, enormous financial and personal havoc and distress are being caused by closing state borders notwithstanding the constitutional guarantee in Section 92 that trade, commerce and intercourse should be absolutely free. Little regard has been shown to the fact that vast parts of a state may be in no danger, or that some economically integrated districts cross state borders. While the politicians will argue that they can constitutionally act to stop infection, this is too often not necessary or proportionate to the risk and thus unconstitutional. Why doesn’t Canberra act? Rather, closures seem too often to be imposed arbitrarily and for the political advantage of power-drunk politicians under the delusion that they are demonstrating the strength that wins elections and impresses a gullible media. This is one appalling aspect to a totally misjudged response to the Wuhan virus — failing to protect the vulnerable while imposing excessive financial and emotional problems on the population.

Meanwhile at the US Democratic Party Convention, powerbrokers realised from her devastating failure in the primaries that their preferred choice, Kamala Harris, who was so extreme she would go even further than Obama in delivering the decline of America, was wholly unelectable. So, they hit on the solution of having Joe Biden keep the seat warm for her. But then they made the mistake of allowing the centrepiece of both acceptance speeches to be the easily demonstrable lie that President Trump once praised neo-Nazis and white supremacists as ‘very fine people’. He did not. Worse, Mrs Obama had earlier gone out of her way to ensure a Trump victory which, in any event, was already likely. This was during her endorsement of the Biden-Harris presidency. Beijing, probably the most prominent source of the Biden family’s enrichment, unsurprisingly agreed. Mrs Obama’s ‘mis-step’ was her ominous threat to voters, ‘If you think things can possibly get worse, trust me, they can, and they will…’. In other words, Democrat governors and mayors will only stop the riots, looting, murders, increased crime and police defunding on the orders of their anarchist-communist BLM accomplices if Americans vote Biden-Harris. But voters will surely wonder whether this anarchy would continue under a Biden-Harris presidency especially if their allies, the BLM, insist. As for the true presidential candidate, does the mainstream US media persist with the transparent lie that she is a moderate? Her Senate voting record was more to the left than even Bernie Sanders’. And he’s so far to the left that he chose to honeymoon in the Soviet Union. As for trusting what she says, in the recent primaries she accused Biden of being a racist and of serious sexual harassment. Now she strongly supports his endorsement in the belief that she will take his place if and when he proves incapable, which most Americans think likely.