- by Richard Titelius
- The Guardian
- Issue #1993
In the shadow of WA Premier Mark McGowan’s announcement of a new mandate and restrictions to be imposed once the WA hard border falls on 5th February, the Australian Peacemakers held a rally at the Supreme Court Gardens to oppose the vaccine mandates which they believe are a form of segregation or medical apartheid.
The first speaker, claimed Premier McGowan is using coercion as a public health policy to remove healthy people from society. To illustrate her point she quoted McGowan when he announced tough new double vaccination requirements for Western Australians to enter, pubs, the casino, gyms and bottle shops saying, “Life is about to get difficult for the unvaccinated.” She countered saying, “No, life will become difficult for Premier McGowan when the underground rise up.” The speaker suggested the COVID restrictions were part of a bullying culture that was damaging the fabric of society, including that it was tantamount to genocide to tell Aboriginal people the needle is safe and COVID kills. She even went as far as to say this was a hypothetical pandemic, the government should be censured for lying to the people, is engaging in discrimination and the public has a duty to engage in civil disobedience, as these directives are unlawful.
Another speaker with a supposed human rights background said children were being jabbed against their will, public health policies were not working and the government will be held accountable. To assist parents in protecting their children, the organisation which she represents will be holding advocacy training to help inform parents about the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child when dealing with school teachers and principals.
A speaker in a video which was filmed from a car in a suburban Sydney as it grappled with high levels of COVID cases said that opposition to vaccine mandates and other restrictions went across the racial and cultural divides adding, “everybody has to make decisions based on their circumstances.” “The real enemy,” the video speaker said, “is the government, the corporate media and the big pharmaceutical companies.”
Adjunct Professor of Law at Notre Dame University, Augusto Zimmerman told the 20,000 plus crowd they were on the right side of history. Zimmerman said this is not Nazi Germany and Premier McGowan was behaving like Adolf Hitler. The MC for the event, Aaron Malloy told the crowd the Governor Kim Beazley was the only person who can dissolve the parliament and call fresh elections, adding that this had happened twice before in Australian history, once in NSW and again in 1975 when Governor-General Kerr sacked the then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Malloy urged people, “Now was the time to stand together and renounce tyranny.” The rally then marched to Government House.
I spoke with one of the organisers after the rally and asked him why the rally hadn’t gone to Parliament House as it was Premier Mark McGowan’s Labor government which had come into power through the ballot box and the majority of Western Australians had voted to re-elect him in March 2021. He replied that Western Australians had voted for him before he had brought in the COVID mandates. The suggestion that public opinion polls continued to give high levels of support to McGowan and that nearly ninety per cent of Western Australians had been vaccinated did not succeed in changing his mind.
The next day as Omicron cases passed one-hundred in WA, the Premier announced the reintroduction of masks in all indoor settings in the Perth and Peel regions underscoring the seriousness of the crisis while remaining firm on his resolve to bring down the hard borders on 5th February. The Minister for Health, Amber Sanderson even went so far as to suggest the government would not be able to control the spread of the virus now.
It would be a rich irony indeed that the last public gathering in Perth for a while was a rally against the measures necessary to slow and control the spread of the COVID virus.
The Communist Party of Australia supports vaccination to control the spread of the virus and bolster people’s immune systems should they contract the virus. The CPA also supports safe and healthy workplaces by having workers vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus.
The CPA demands paid COVID leave for all workers who need testing, isolation, illness, quarantine and recovery.
Read the CPA statement for COVID safe community: cpa.org.au/statement/2021-2
