They were the three words of the week, if not of the year: ‘vaccine’, ‘mandates’ and ‘unlawful’. That was the key takeout from the decision handed down this week by the Queensland Supreme Court in a case largely financed by mining gazillionaire and political agitator Clive Palmer. Specifically, the Covid-19 vaccine mandates, implemented in the form of directions given to Queensland police and ambulance service workers, were made unlawfully, the court has ruled, partly because they didn’t take into account those workers’ ‘human rights’.

The news, of course, is to be welcomed. It is the first crack in the dam wall and will hopefully be followed by significant class actions and further court cases. Ideally, one might hope that certain senior politicians, senior bureaucrats, doctors and corporate heads will wind up in prison for their collective roles in the grotesque Covid abuse of power, following a royal commission. However, there is the chance that the Queensland case will be overturned on appeal, as the powers-that-be attempt to reassert their censorship and crushing authoritarianism over what remains the most disgraceful period in our history.

Alone – and we really do mean alone – among the Australian mainstream media, indeed in many instances the world media, The Spectator Australia fought from the very beginning against the vaccine mandates, the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the school closures, the banning of perfectly good (and cheap) alternative treatments for Covid and the fraudulent claims being made about the safety of the mRNA ‘vaccines’. Dismissed as conspiracy theorists, extreme right-wingers, anti-vaxxers and a whole list of other pejoratives, this magazine and its astonishing collection of writers can hold their heads high – Rebecca Weisser, Ramesh Thakur, Julie Sladden, Kara Thomas, Alexandra Marshall, David Flint, David Adler, James Allan, Rocco Loiacono, Robert Clancy, Rowan Dean and many others. Of course, there were a miserable handful of writers, and readers, who were appalled by our Covid scepticism and took their writing skills or subscriptions to other media outlets more in tune with their views. They are not missed.

On 22 May 2021, as powerful voices and commentators within the Australian media frantically urged the government to introduce vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, we wrote on this page:

So we will be blunt on this particular occasion: if Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt or any members of the federal or ‘national’ cabinets seek to impose a ‘vaccine passport’ that restricts the freedom of movement and liberties of Australians, they will potentially be guilty of human rights abuses and even crimes against humanity. 

Any number of conventions and laws exist that make it a criminal offence for a government or its bureaucrats to coerce or make mandatory any form of medical treatment against the will of the individual. Such laws and conventions were brought in as a direct result of the atrocities of the second world war and the revolting medical experiments conducted by not only the Nazis but other totalitarian regimes against their own people.

Make no mistake; a ‘vaccine passport’ denying liberties and restricting the free movement of Australians within their own country will be the most sinister and disgraceful act by an Australian government against its own people in our history. This is for one simple reason: governments and bureaucracies have no right to enforce or to coerce an individual to take a medical treatment or drug against the individual’s better instincts or judgment.

In any free society, the government’s role is to persuade, not to coerce or to mandate.

It is a fine line between encouraging or incentivising vaccination and coercing it, but telling traumatised Australians that they can, for example, only visit their loved ones or carry on their normal business if they inject a certain drug is completely unacceptable and indeed reprehensible. Persuasion is all very well. Coercion and emotional or financial blackmail are not.

Then on 3 July 2021, we wrote:

It is on the coronavirus that an absence of any genuine political convictions on the part of the PM and his advisers is most apparent. Devoid of a bedrock of political philosophy to stand upon, the government makes it up as it goes along, reacting, presumably, to internal polling as much as to media hysteria. It is not a pretty sight.

Most depressing of all, as certain politicians urged people to report friends or neighbours who were flouting the rules, on 31 July 2021 we wrote:

Welcome to the new Australia of dobbers, scolds and snitches and the self-appointed virtuous.

Kudos to Queensland Judge Glenn Martin for having the courage and moral fortitude to put into law what was always self-evident to any self-respecting conservative. The vaccine mandates trashed every ethical, moral, medical and human rights principle in a free democracy.

To all those individuals, not only in Queensland but throughout Australia, who lost their careers, their dignity and even their families because they resisted the mandates, you are true heroes. Every Australian owes you a huge debt for your courage, and an apology for the medieval vilification so many suffered.

To the few brave politicians who dared to speak up against the madness, often at terrible personal or professional cost, we salute you. Craig Kelly, Alex Antic, George Christensen, Gerard Rennick, Malcolm Roberts, Pauline Hanson, Matt Canavan and others. Above all, we thank all our loyal readers who stayed the course.