‘A year after coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China’s Xi declares 2020 a triumph.’ The Washington Post thus approvingly headlined the Communist Chinese dictator’s New Year Address to celebrating crowds ignoring social distancing in the streets of Wuhan, the very place from where Xi released a plague onto an unsuspecting world.

A triumph indeed, especially when the candidate of the Post and other mainstream media, as well as Red China, seemed almost ensconced in the White House. This chillingly recalls the warning of Alexander Hamilton, that the most likely corruption of the US electoral process would come about if a foreign power should ‘gain an improper ascendant in our councils.’

Beijing’s triumph was reflected in Australia when in March the National Cabinet chose to ignore world’s best practice as developed in Taiwan. As former Victorian Treasury economist Sanjeev Sabhlock put it, embracing instead ‘the cowardly, totalitarian, zombie ways of the communist Chinese government’, and especially, their alien lockdown.

As to America today, reliable pollsters consistently indicate there is no doubt in the minds of many millions that Donald Trump won the Presidential election. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that any fair person, studying reports of the several challenges to the election, would agree there are mountains of highly persuasive supporting evidence, direct and circumstantial.

To an Australian, the coup de grâce must be the contrived absence of Republican scrutineers (observers) , and the obstacles they encountered, something totally unacceptable in the land where the secret or Australian ballot was devised.

Indicative of the corruption of much of the mainstream media has been the shocking practice of preceding references to allegations of fraud with the adjective ‘baseless’ or some synonym, contrasting with the enthusiastically endorsed reporting over four years of demonstrably groundless claims against the President and in particular in relation to Russian collusion.

That the Supreme Court and lesser courts have almost invariably refused to hear the evidence, but found technicalities for not so doing, reflects on if not the independence, the lack of courage of too many of the judges. This is admittedly in a country where Democrat-aligned Marxist paramilitaries have run rampant with impunity during the year in Democrat-run cities.

By the time this column appears, and subject to Vice President Pence exercising his constitutional powers to the full and not too many RINOS — Republicans in Name Only — abandoning their duty, the elections in the key battleground states could be the subject of an urgent and genuine audit. The result may then not be the first-ever fulfilment of Hamilton’s warning.

Meanwhile in Australia there could no better example of the application of Acton’s great principle that absolute power corrupts absolutely, than the political mismanagement of the Wuhan virus in Australia.

Politicians and bureaucrats, encouraged by the mainstream media, would have you believe that its lesser impact in Australia is all their work. Not so. It is because we are one or two remote islands.

The National Cabinet’s adoption of the Beijing model, with its cruel lockdown, based on faulty and secretive computer modelling, has had appalling consequences. Taiwan, with world’s best practice and a similar population, has had only seven deaths, achieved without suffocating businesses and careers, causing unnecessary stress and grief, or abandoning the vulnerable, as did our politicians.

As mentioned previously here, every one of our lauded checks and balances has failed to discipline this embryonic dictatorial class. With absolute power, they are now playing with Australians as a cat plays with a wounded mouse. Inexplicably abandoning flattening-the-curve for eradication, they almost daily preside over communiques concerning a grim 1984-style endless struggle, with their inevitable outbreaks, clusters and continual testing, with which the dutiful media endeavour to shock the population into obedience .

The politicians invariably camouflage this Orwellian game by claiming that their action is justified by ‘the’ science. But as they were with stomach ulcers, scientists are as divided on this as they are on global warming.

‘The’ science is used to justify, without proper explanation, such arbitrary nonsense as in NSW this week when suddenly only 100 people can go to a funeral or a wedding —even one in a vast cathedral — while a major sports event is allowed to proceed, or masks are made compulsory when, even at the height of the plague, they were deemed not so important as to justify compulsion by- word-of-premier.

That this is all a dark power game for the politicians is self-evident. The worst manifestation of this is the opening and closing of state borders on a whim. It has become the ultimate toy of the power-crazy, and is clearly all designed to create maximum stress, torment and even inhuman grief.

Given that the High Court has so casually abdicated any control in this area notwithstanding the core constitutional principle that trade, commerce and intercourse between the states be absolutely free, the answer is for Canberra to begin to offer some real national leadership. This could be instead of being by far the world leader in so greedily cornering most taxes raised.

The solution is simple: federal legislation authorising the only permissible internal quarantines. These would be in tightly prescribed areas and times through the Federal Executive Council on the basis of immediately published medical evidence demonstrating necessity and specifically approved by a committee of three eminent experts and two eminent public members.

This would be subject to a publicly broadcast committee hearing within three working days with, if needed, renewed public hearings every seven days and always with a devil’s advocate, an Alan Jones, to expose chicanery and mendacity.

Playing games with state borders, too often for political advantage, demonstrates that most states are too large and too centralised, holding back development outside capitals bloated through high immigration designed to fabricate fake GDP growth. Minimal regional development is assured by refusing to harvest water.

There has not been a new state since 1859; the Americans have had about 20. The people of a potential state should be able to initiate by petition a referendum for its formation.