By CR on Tuesday, 01 September 2020
Category: Constitution and Law

The Good Sauce on Victorian Totalitarianism By James Reed

     The Good Sauce is a great Aussie Freedom journal with great writers and hard-hitting pieces, dealing with things like Australian crises, particularly Victoria, where the state of emergency is going to be extended forever. Here is an extract from Professor Zimmerman asking if history is repeating itself, and the answer is of course, “yes.”
  https://goodsauce.news/the-death-of-parliamentary-democracy-in-victoria/?mc_cid=32fc49e203&mc_eid=83a4250ada

“Victorians have watched their state government use a broad range of extraordinary powers to remove fundamental freedoms and control almost every single aspect of their personal lives. It did so by both declaring a state of emergency and a state of disaster, thus imposing draconian lock down measures after a surge in coronavirus infections. Imposed under the pretense of protecting the health of the people, the state of disaster came into effect in Victoria on August 2. Under the Emergency Management Act a state of disaster can be declared if the Premier is satisfied an emergency “constitutes or is likely to constitute a significant and widespread danger to life or property in Victoria”. But Victoria is also under a state of emergency, which came into effect on March 16. The declaration was made under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008, which allows health officials to detain people, search premises without a warrant, and force people or areas into lock down if it is deemed necessary to protect public health. And now the Victorian Premier expresses his desire to extend the state of emergency for an indefinite period. He is effectively repeating history by revealing his intention to extend his emergency powers indefinitely. The Premier is currently working with the State’s Solicitor General to enact another provision to extend the state of emergency for an indefinite period of time. He claims this is necessary because of ‘the authority and the effectiveness of all the measures that we’ve put in place’.

This appears to confirm the worst fears of Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In his seminal ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ (1981), he contended that “temporary” measures seem to have a way of becoming permanent after the emergency is over. Hayek offered this sobering reflection: “The conditions under which such emergency powers may be granted without creating the danger that they will be retained when the absolute necessity has passed are among the most difficult and important points a constitution must decide on. ‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.” This is not so dissimilar to what happened to a certain European country in the 1930s. There, a certain German Chancellor also turned his own state of emergency into a more permanent one. The correlation between the instrument used by that particular government to continue exercising its emergency and the intention of the Victorian government to turn its emergency power into a permanent one is irrefutable. It can be manifested, among several other things, in the disregard for fundamental rights coupled by the passive behaviour of the population and a considerable silence of the legal profession in upholding the rule of law. It might be important to remind ourselves how dictatorial regimes are brought into existence. There is always a state of emergency used to justify the suspension of constitutional rights and I wish to be absolutely clear about this. However, I do not wish my words to be misconstrued and my opinions mischaracterised. As such, I wish to make myself absolutely clear that I am not comparing the use of emergency powers by the Victorian Premier and the use of similar instruments by a particular German dictator in the 1930s. This is therefore not about how emergency powers can be used by the respective governments, but the instrument by which such powers can be used to justify arbitrary power and governmental control over the life, liberty and property of the people. After making this proviso I can now explain how emergency powers that appeal to the “health” of the community have served as an instrument of perpetuation of power and oppression of the people. The history of Germany in the 1930s provides a good case point.”

     The point to be made is that an arbitrary use of emergency powers, as was done under German national socialism, ultimately plunges society into a highly undesirable state, and outright tyranny. Each new measure leads to the need for further social control, because politicians are drunk on power, and corrupted by it.
  https://goodsauce.news/tone-deaf-daniel-andrews-lectures-victorians-through-australias-biggest-moron/?mc_cid=32fc49e203&mc_eid=83a4250ada

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