It is a safe bet that Sir Robert Menzies would be deeply disturbed by the latest amendments to the national law regulating health practitioners. In his book, The Measure of the Years, Menzies wrote, ‘I would hate to see in my own country, any government scheme which lowered the importance of the doctor-patient relationship’. Sadly, that is a key purpose of the amendments which were nonetheless supported by Liberal governments in New South Wales and Tasmania.

The Australian code of conduct for doctors stipulates that ‘the care of your patient is your primary concern’. Yet the legislation which was passed by the Queensland parliament on 13 October inserts a new paramount principle making ‘protection of the public, and public confidence in the safety of services provided by registered health practitioners… paramount considerations’.

This places an explicit obligation on doctors to put ‘protection of the public and public confidence foremost in all decisions and actions’.Failure to do so provides grounds for the regulator and national boards to take action against a doctor including their deregistration.

This is what happened during the pandemic. Doctors had their registration suspended for criticising lockdowns or issuing mask or vaccine exemptions. Many are still unable to practice. There was no legislative foundation for this; the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency simply issued a position statement on 9 March 2021 warning that any ‘health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign… may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action’.

Under the amended law, no doctor will be able to provide any treatment or express any opinion that goes against whatever the bureaucrats at AHPRA decide must be done ‘to protect the public’. The bureaucrat will come between the doctor and the patient and demand the doctor does what government thinks is best for the public not what the doctor thinks is best for the patient.

What’s more, having been passed by the Queensland parliament, the amendments now automatically apply in all other states and territories, with minor variations in Western Australia, South Australia and NSW. It seems extraordinary that the health bureaucrats are to be given increased powers when they made so many appalling decisions throughout the pandemic, particularly coercing people into vaccination even though there was no evidence that vaccines could stop transmission of the virus.

Indeed, health bureaucrats in Australia are still telling us that the Covid vaccines are safe and effective for everyone from six months up despite the fact that in children aged 5 to 17 there have been almost over 1,100 reports of chest pain, almost 500 cases of heart inflammation, over 800 reports of cardiac disorders, and ten deaths, including one from myocarditis, one from brain herniation, and three from cardiac arrest.

As leading cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough noted, before the Covid vaccines were rolled out a Finnish study showed that there were four cases of myocarditis per million whereas a study done in Thailand shows that since the rollout of Covid vaccines, the incidence is now 25,000 cases per million.

In an address to the Robert Menzies Institute on 13 October Jonathan Sumption, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, warned that governments rarely relinquish powers that they have acquired. Indeed, in Australia, state governments are increasing their pandemic powers.

In South Australia, for example, the new Labor government’s Public Health Act empowers an authorised officer to do all the things that they could under the Emergency Management Act of 2004 – such as break into buildings or vehicles, remove or destroy buildings, vehicles or animals – but it goes further, removing the right of appeal to a Magistrate’s Court for a review of those directions which existed under the Act of 2004. Similarly, a person may be detained, isolated or segregated and subjected to a decontamination procedure, or directed to undergo medical observation or a diagnostic procedure or treatment without any obligation on the part of the officer exercising those powers to ensure that reasonable steps are taken to notify the next of kin, an obligation that existed under the previous Act. Indeed, even if the person appears to be mentally ill, the enforcing officer no longer has to consider if an individual should be managed under the Mental Health Act of 2009.

One of the most depressing aspects of the South Australian legislation is that the Liberals did not support the amendments proposed by One Nation’s Sarah Game to retain the right of appeal to a magistrate, or a minor amendment that would have ensured legal action against vaccine mandates would be allowed to continue.

In Western Australia, the Emergency Management Amendment Bill takes management of the pandemic away from the minister and hands it to a public servant whose officers can break or enter into any building or vehicle and put a person in detention without any ministerial or parliamentary oversight.

One of the most disheartening proposals of the pandemic was that of former federal Liberal minister for communications Paul Fletcher to provide the bureaucrats at the Australian Communications and Media Authority with the powers to require Big Tech to censor anything the bureaucrats decided was misinformation or disinformation. For a party that traces its political philosophy to the writings of John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke it was a low moment.

Sumption believes the changes that occurred in our political culture during the pandemic are not temporary, that we are entering a Hobbesian world in which liberty is being traded away for security. Menzies would have been horrified. He wrote in a prize-winning essay in his teens after world war one that, ‘Some infringements of the “Liberty of the subject” are inevitable in any war’ but ‘Should the almost arbitrary power of the Executive prove to be anything else but temporary, a very great disaster would have befallen the English Constitution’.

Quite.

But will today’s Liberals pay heed?

Rebecca Weisser is an independent journalist. Like what you read?  Consider supporting her work at PayPal.