The writer is in Australia.
LAWFARE isn’t just the preserve of the elites and the insider class. The broad progressive movement and all its operating divisions – whether it is the woke, the climateers (just ask Mark Steyn), the me-too sexual assault accuser class, the anti-Trumpers – have mastered the art of silencing and punishing opponents by deft use of the law. But sometimes the good guys can use the law to achieve justice and policy goals, too.
One headline this week caught the attention of Australia’s covid dissidents. The Epoch Times reported: ‘Australian Employer Ordered to Pay Compensation for Vaccine Injured in ‘Significant Precedent’.’
It is difficult to recall more than one or two isolated cases of the law standing up for Australian citizens’ rights during the lockdowns, the vicious thuggery of our police forces, the abandonment of parliamentary democracy, the illegal border closures, the curtailment of overseas travel rights, the army helicopter-enforced curfews, the vaccine mandates, and the Government-led prohibition of safe and effective drugs to treat Covid.
A travesty. The system failed us. The rule of law proved chimeric. Human Rights Commissions? They were MIA during Covid, when massive and obvious human rights infractions were occurring all over the place, on an hourly basis.
Yet there is new hope for revenge, I mean justice. Senator Gerard Rennick, one of Australia’s ‘Covid Five’ in the Commonwealth Parliament (with Alex Antic, Matt Canavan, Malcom Roberts and Ralph Babet) has noted: ‘Employers are now going to think twice about forcing people to get a vaccine.’
The case concerns a South Australian public servant, Daniel Shepherd, a child and youth support worker with South Australia’s Department of Child Protection.
Mr Shepherd, now 44, received two covid vaccinations on August 19, 2021, and September 9, 2021, according to documents submitted to the South Australian Employment Tribunal.
After both jabs he experienced aching joints, cold, and flu symptoms, and minor chest pain for one to two weeks.
Section 25 of South Australia’s Emergency Management Act in January 2022 which required support and healthcare workers to receive a third dose of the vaccine to continue working and Mrs Shepherd was told by his employer that he would lose his job if he did not comply.
He received his third booster dose on February 24, 2022, and subsequently developed pericarditis.
He filed a claim for compensation against his employer, the State of South Australia. The state acknowledged that the third dose caused Mr Shepherd’s pericarditis and incapacity to work, but denied responsibility for the injury, arguing that it did not arise from Shepherd’s employment, but from a lawful State Government Public Health Order (PHO), issued under the Emergency Management Act 2004 (EMA).
Tribunal judge Mark Calligeros rejected those arguments and ruled that because the injury arose as a result of both the state-directed vaccination mandate and his employment, Mr Shepherd was entitled to workers compensation. The judge saw through the slipperiness and chicanery of the State. This is significant.
The redoubtable Rebekah Barnett of Dystopian Down Under has been on the case. She explains that many Australian employers have sought to deflect responsibility for injuries incurred under workplace covid vaccine directives on the basis that they were simply following state government orders.
This case means that the workplace is liable if employment is ‘a significant contributing cause of the injury’, regardless of whether other factors contributed.
The future trajectory of the Shepherd case is uncertain: the Covid State will certainly fight back to hold the terrain it has won. But the mighty Rennick is right – tens of thousands of vaccine-forced and vaccine-injured will be pondering the possibilities.
The inadequacy of compensation options available to Australians injured by the covid vaccines prompted a Whitsundays GP, Dr Melissa McCann, to initiate a covid vaccine injury class action, which filed in the Federal Court in April 2023, and is still taking on members.
The action seeks to hold the regulatory Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) to account for alleged ‘negligence, breach of statutory duty and misfeasance in public office’ in its failure to properly approve and monitor the covid vaccines, resulting in harms to Australians.
Anyone paying attention to the activities and strategies of the massed forces of the global ruling elite, as is the journalist Seamus Bruner, author of the recently released book, Controligarchs, will know that these people play for keeps. Theirs is a long game. And they do not like pushback.
The counter-revolution will need to deploy many weapons. The law, might, just might, be one of these weapons. There must be a few judges out there who can see what has been going on these past years. Watch this space.