Day: September 24, 2021

Reposted from Quadrant online.

Written by Augusto Zimmermann September 18, 2021

here is one ambition at least which I ever will acknowledge, which I will not renounce but with my life – it is the ambition of delivering to my posterity those rights of freedom which I have received from my ancestors. I am not pleading the cause of an individual, but of every freeholder in England… Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where the law ends, there tyranny begins.                                      

— William Pitt addressing the House of Lords, January 9, 1770 ^[1]

Since March 2020 Australia’s governments have been using their powers to excessively coerce, obstruct or otherwise unreasonably interfere with the life, liberty and property of the citizen. These governments are exercising emergency powers to impose measures that profoundly undermine basic principles of the rule of law, including equality before the law and the right of citizens to be protected from unpredictable and arbitrary interference with their vital interests. On the pretence of fighting a virus, draconian measures have been adopted that profoundly violate the Australian Constitution and the inalienable rights of the individual.