Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Over the past 2½ years, Australians have witnessed the rise of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat. We've witnessed the power these people now have over our lives. During this time, expert health officials incessantly pushed for lockdowns, mandates and other nonsensical restrictions, restrictions which have proven to be both moral and medical failures. Doctors with concerns about the response to COVID found that nameless and faceless figures from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency—AHPRA—would suspend their licences to practise medicine if they contradicted the bureaucracy's narratives, even in private, thus dismantling the doctor-patient confidentiality relationship and the idea of trusting your doctor's personal expertise rather than bureaucratic edicts.

Incomprehensible rules and pointless procedures are the bread and butter of bureaucracies. In fact, the word 'bureaucracy' itself means literally 'rule by desk', which is fitting, as very often these rules are made quite distant from those whose lives their decisions affect. Over the decades, parliaments have passed more and more laws and more and more regulations. We've hired more and more public servants, therefore, in order to ensure that those administrative matters are taken into account. These departments were created to fix problems, but they are concerned with justifying their internal processes rather than delivering measurable outcomes. The system has hidden behind experts telling us to blindly trust the science and refrain from asking questions using basic logic. Anyone who has been paying even the slightest amount of attention can see that many of the so-called experts have been wrong on virtually every point in the last two years, from lockdowns to the injections being safe and effective. Bureaucrats like to keep the fear alive to solidify their own importance and therefore their own funding. If there's one word I never want to hear again, it's 'modelling'. When was the last model that was proven in hindsight to be accurate?

It's not just the COVID experience which bells the cat on the rise of big government; one only has to look at the intrusions by government into our lives in areas like the climate, the surveillance state and the rise of the quasi-state operatives, and the apparatchiks of the big government ethos in universities and in schools, and a woke corporate sector and its insidious ESG agenda. Politicians must stop simply enforcing the whims of bureaucrats and the so-called experts. We exist to serve you, the Australian people, not to control your lives. There's an old biblical teaching which states, 'The greatest among you shall be your servant.' This is the basis for the Western ethos of political leadership. In the entire history of mankind, there has never been a bureaucracy which is sincerely and genuinely concerned about people.

Always question everything. Always look for ulterior motives. Why have they allowed Australians to be vilified? Why have they allowed Australians to be thrown out of jobs and discriminated against? Is it because they care so much about our safety? Or is it something else—something more sinister? Nobody should ever take the risk on the promise of being granted their freedom back. This is the stuff of tyrannical authoritarianism, and I hope Australian politics realises that Australians have had enough of having their lives run by people far removed from them. This is Australia, not the People's Republic of China. We should be governed by the lowest and least centralised level of authority as possible to preserve our basic freedoms, including freedom of movement, speech and choice. It's time we scaled back the power of these bureaucracies, and it's time for politicians who say they love this country to go out and prove it. It's time we drain the billabong.