by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
Five years on from the declaration of a global pandemic, I’m weary of Covid inquiries. They tend to go either of two ways. They either run through bureaucratic checkboxes and give everyone a medal for having locked down the fastest and vaccinated the most. Or, they spend months reviewing submissions and focus group transcripts to come to very obvious conclusions, like “closing schools for prolonged periods is damaging for kids” or “people don’t trust public health authorities if you attempt to force everyone to take an over-hyped vaccine“.
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A new report from the Australian Human Rights Commission examining the effects of the state and federal Covid response fits in the latter category, offering predictable insights like “human rights impacts were not always considered or protected”, and that many Australians felt they were “collateral damage” to Government policies.
However, being the only Australian review to have taken extensive and nuanced consideration of human rights, it is worth a look for what it reveals about how the flamekeepers of human rights in this country think about emergency management, conflicting rights and trade-offs.
Collateral Damage
The report, titled Collateral Damage, centres on the personal stories of more than 5,000 Australians following a national survey, community consultations and stories shared through an online portal.
It is the first national review to spotlight the Covid experience of everyday Australians to such an extent, after the Commission received thousands of enquiries and complaints relating to the pandemic.
Overall, it contains some useful insights. Where Government reviews have tended to assume that the right of the community to be protected from a virus automatically trumps the right, say, to bodily autonomy, the Commission makes no assumptions, discussing the human rights trade-offs of key policy decisions in detail, and in the context of Australia’s commitment to international covenants and treaties.
That said, the Commission found a high level of community support for privileging community well-being over individual rights. In the survey, 74% of participants agreed that the greater good of the community should always be considered before individual rights, and only 10% disagreed. When asked specifically whether the Covid vaccine should be mandatory for all except those with medical exemptions, a slimmer majority of 57% of participants agreed, and a sizeable proportion (29%) disagreed.
The report criticises the “disproportionate” nature of Australia’s Covid response, especially the inappropriateness of “blanket and inflexible policies that failed to consider local realities”, and the lack of compassion in the way that extreme measures, like travel bans, vaccine mandates and lockdowns, were implemented.
The Commission found that two in five Australians felt they had been disadvantaged by the Covid situation, while one in five said they had benefited from it (another two in five were neutral). Victorians, who were subject to the world’s longest lockdowns and some of the most extreme pandemic measures ever seen, were the least likely to think the pandemic had been handled well.
