Senior Constable Ben Falconer’s challenge to the mandatory vaccine directions of the Chief Health Officer for Western Australia and the WA Commissioner of Police was dismissed yesterday by the Supreme Court.

The result, frankly, is not surprising, but not necessarily for the cynical motives some may have in mind.

While some aspects of Justice Jeremy Allanson’s judgments (available on the WA Supreme Court website) appeared puzzling from the perspective of one who sat through the trial and listened to the evidence, they highlight a deeper problem.

As Justice Allanson stated:

‘The measures that were taken were undoubtedly extraordinary, but that does not establish that they lacked rationality so as, for that reason, to be beyond power.’

Broadly speaking, a judicial review by a court does not look, for want of a better word, to the morality of a law, but whether the application of that law was within the parameters intended by the Parliament which made that law.

Late last year I berated a former senior Liberal politician in this state, reminding him that, shamefully, it was a Liberal government that passed the Public Health Act and all its draconian provisions. I asked him: ‘What were you doing when the Bill was before the Parliament?’ His response was words to the effect of: ‘Well, they told us not to worry because these provisions will never be used!’

Talk about extraordinary! The response to that should have been: ‘Well, if these provisions are never going to be used, why are they there?’ Of course, that question was never asked.

As Ben told Liam Bartlett on the 6PR Mornings Program straight after the judgment was delivered, he wasn’t surprised by the outcome, since what we are dealing with here are bad laws.

The Public Health and Emergency legislation confers extremely wide powers on politicians and bureaucrats. They are bad laws. And when you have politicians and bureaucrats, as we do by the truckload in this country, who have the George Costanza approach to ethics and the truth combined with the Mao Zedong approach to exercising power (in other words, bastards, as our editor-in-chief rightly called them), the rule of law, and thus our society, suffers.

As Liam Bartlett pointed out (and as previously reported here), what kind of transparency is there when the Chief Health Officer will not even go into the witness box to justify to the public why he believed it was legitimate to take away people’s livelihoods via a mandatory vaccination policy?

These bad laws on the Chief Health Officer’s ‘advice’ are still keeping unvaccinated doctors and nurses out of hospitals when there are chronic staff shortages, no ICU beds available in the middle of winter, and several cases of medication bungles leaving patients fighting for their lives because medical staff are having to do double shifts, and the rest, owing to the staff shortages.

 These bad laws mean that the Queensland Education Department is now threatening to dock pay of those teachers who chose not to be vaccinated since ‘they cannot be trusted’, notwithstanding that the vaccine mandate pertaining to them has been revoked.

All this flies in the face of the evidence that vaccine mandates don’t work and are counter-productive for many reasons.

However, outside court yesterday, Ben quoted Martin Luther King Jr, who declared that we have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. ‘I think the country needs to spend some time with that,’ Ben said.

He added that this is only the beginning. As noted before in these pages, there are other options available to be pursued and they are being considered. What is more, critics will learn soon why this overreach must be fought against and why people like Ben are willing to sacrifice their careers to demonstrate that. 

As our editor-in-chief wrote:

‘Last week, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in America announced it would no longer distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. This is the same mob who spent the last two years screeching about “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” – another falsity that has quietly dropped out of print without apology or retraction.’

In Chicago this week, health workers who were sacked for refusing the jab have been awarded millions of dollars in compensation. 

Ben Falconer is on the right side of history. Watch this space.

Dr Rocco Loiacono is a legal academic, writer and translator.

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