Mandates and freedoms: why we can’t even discuss them sensibly

The incoherence and ignorance around basic rights in a pandemic not only demonstrate Australia’s inability to rationally discuss rights issues, but come with major political ramifications, with far-right politicians both within and outside the government threatening to block or refuse to support legislation over vaccine mandates.

That’s in addition to the growing violence and extremism of some sections of what used to be the anti-lockdown movement but which, in the face of a steady return to normality, has become a generic “freedom” movement, albeit with eccentric ideas about how freedom and rights interact.

The vaccine mandate issue is straightforward. It’s entirely ethical to mandate vaccinations for social environments. No one is compelled to be vaccinated; the compulsion lies in preventing the unvaccinated from increasing the risk of harm to others by mixing with them. Indeed, there’s an argument for compelling vaccination itself, given the costs the unvaccinated inflict on society through additional health system costs, but this can be addressed through other means, such as charging them the full cost of their treatment.

However, given we don’t do this for people who take other forms of medically expensive risk — the overweight and obese, or participants in injury-prone sports — singling out the unvaccinated would be inequitable.

Nonetheless, the far right has seized on the issue despite the small numbers of vaccine refuseniks, confusing it with a broader lament about freedom. Scott Morrison can have no complaints that his legislative agenda is being frustrated by anti-mandate senators, however, given that he himself has sought to pander to the same sentiments with his attacks on state Labor governments.

The broader “freedom” protests — putting aside for a moment the Nazis, anti-vaxxers and opportunists that infest them — relate to quite different issues: freedom of movement, economic freedom and freedom from government surveillance.

There’s massive hypocrisy here. To see News Corp, which has cheered on endless rounds of extensions of government security laws in recent years, pretending to be some advocate for freedom and the rights of citizens against government, is sickening. If News Corp was the media company it pretends to be, rather than the media arm of the Liberal party, the job of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments in further restricting Australians’ basic rights for the cause of anti-terrorism would have been far harder since 2013.

And how many of those marching against lockdowns ever spoke out about mass surveillance being imposed on them, or the government giving itself the power to monitor and interfere with their online actions?

Still, hypocrisy doesn’t undermine legitimate concerns about government overreach. And the experience of two decades of the War On Terror is that government powers, once ratcheted up at the expense of citizens, are never ratcheted back down. Moreover, there are strong grounds to distrust the insistence of state and federal governments that the draconian powers used in lockdowns are employed purely on the advice of experts.

We learnt from the then-deputy premier that the Berejiklian government’s Sydney curfew was imposed because of pressure from the media, despite there being poor evidence for their efficacy. And today we learnt that the draconian lockdowns imposed on much of western Sydney by Berejiklian was at odds with the advice she received from the state’s chief health officer.

Travel restrictions have also been enforced selectively, with Coalition figures, prominent business figures and celebrities allowed to travel with far greater ease than the rest of us.

That makes the trust that governments demand from citizens when giving themselves additional powers hard to give. The lack of accountability for serious mistakes made during the pandemic — Ruby Princess, Victorian quarantine, aged care, vaccine acquisition — makes it even more difficult.

But there’s no strong community capacity to discuss rights and how governments relate to them. While few may be as thick as the Mt Gambier protester complaining that his Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated (presumably he’ll dial 911 when he gets COVID), the lack of any constitutional framework for rights — an object of left-right unanimity in the United States; here, bitterly opposed by the right — means Australians don’t even have a language for discussing what freedoms they should have from government control, what the ethical and social bases for such rights might be, and the jurisprudence that explains them.

It means that even assuming good faith among participants, we can’t have any sort of meaningful debate about how rights should be protected against government overreach and what special circumstances like pandemics should require.

And needless to say, there’s very little good faith — from a federal government eager to appeal to extremists, or Nazis and anti-vaxxers looking for new recruits, or media outlets whose only perspective is how to monetise discontent, or progressives eager to demonise people unhappy with government powers.