This piece also Features the Spectacular Photography of Dean Sewell.
John Stapleton addresses the madness of the past few years elegantly and with an urgent clarity that puts most commentators – and all politicians and bureaucrats – to shame.
Steve Waterson, Senior Editor, The Australian.
With terrifying clarity and a unique literary flair, John Stapleton chaperones us through our social decline and the loss of our civil liberties.
Dean Sewell, multi-award winning news photographer.
At a time when the powers that be wish that Covid questioning would simply go away, there are those, sadly few in number, who continue to probe the inconvenient issues. And tell the real stories of the Covid madness. John Stapleton, again, is leading the charge. Indispensable reading.
Paul Collits, leading Australian political commentator.
John Stapleton is one of only a handful of journalists with the integrity and courage to challenge the Covid narrative. “Australia Breaks Apart” is destined to be a masterpiece.
Dr Guy Campbell, Australian Medical Professionals Society.
The humanitarian crimes committed by Australian authorities against their own citizens, beginning in early 2020, will live on in infamy, but it is the people themselves who create a nation’s history.
On the 12th of February 2022, the largest gathering of Australians in the nation’s history marched on the National Parliament in Canberra to protest the totalitarianism of the Australian Government, chanting “Sack Them All, Sack Them All”.
Crowd numbers are notoriously difficult to calculate and prone to distortion, but whatever the number, no politician, intelligence agency, police force or political strategist in Australia failed to notice that a massive number of people marched on the nation’s capital, with a remarkable amount of good cheer, jubilance and camaraderie; character traits which the nation’s leaders had failed to show in the years of authoritarian derangement.
Between 2020 and 2022 Australia was gripped by a madness which was spiritual, administrative, political, social and judicial in its dimensions. Australians who stood up against the rising tide of tyranny found themselves pepper sprayed, bashed by police, fined and imprisoned in dictatorial abuses which made headlines around the world, a warning to the world against Covid overreach.
A nation which once prided itself on its laissez faire approach to life and the friendly, easy going nature of its population lay besmirched by a descent into totalitarianism. All the systems Australians had come to rely on failed them at their time of greatest need, every last one of them: the mainstream media, the social media platforms, the legal, medical and academic professions, politicians, bureaucrats, the police, the military and the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Australia’s democracy proved virus thin.
Retired news reporter John Stapleton shines a light on one of the darkest episodes in the Australian story. Australia Breaks Apart is a fine demonstration of the old saying, journalism is the first draft of history.
In mid-2021, with the impending release of his previous book Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia, author John Stapleton was asked to give a speech, on Zoom, at a forum organised by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.
At that point in time even to question the Covid narrative was considered deeply socially irresponsible; and very few Australian journalists did.
Who were we to doubt the word of epidemiologists, doctors, health experts? To doubt the word of The World Health Organisation? The vaccine hesitant, such as himself, were regarded as no better than sociopaths. In any case, if you dared doubt, the algorithms would delete you.
As events unfolded, it became obvious that if the journalists had played their traditionally sceptical role critical role, the health bureaucrats and politicians who visited this fiasco visited upon Australia would never have got away with it.
Being of a certain age, he was forty when computers came into common use, the speech he was asked to give was his first encounter with Zoom, the messaging app which allowed online meetings and which every bright young thing was already taking for granted.
He managed to cut himself shaving just before the Forum started, and the cut refused to heal. He spent half the meeting dabbing himself with a towel as the blood kept pouring. He was such a novice he didn’t even realise his every gesture could be seen by the other participants, including three Islamic doctors all promoting the virtues of vaccines.
The Forum was called “Coronavirus: A Conversation Beyond The Hype and Fear: Addressing Concerns about CoronaVirus, Vaccines & Lockdowns.”
Other speakers included the Grand Mufti of Australia, the Assistant Minister for Community Safety and Multicultural Affairs Jason Wood and senior Opposition figure Jim Chalmers, soon enough to become the nation’s Treasurer. Three Muslim doctors extolled the importance of getting vaccinated.
All sang true to the Covid songbook; all except him.
He had been invited by Keysar Trad, the then President of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils and over the decades one of the most famous or infamous of the nation’s Muslim spokesmen. Stapleton was deliberately invited in order to sing out of tune to the mass hypnosis; a Psyop program on an unprecedented scale.
Western Sydney, parts of which were almost entirely Islamic, had suffered enormously through the lockdowns, unable to attend the mosque or see their families, the two cornerstones of their lives.
Here’s an edited version of the speech.
We deliver alright
***
Public servants like to talk about “evidence based policy”.
Well, where is the evidence that lockdowns work?
Australia’s democracy has proved virus thin. There has never been a more politicised and thereby more disastrously mismanaged disease. Eighteen months on from the country’s first COVID death Australia is almost unrecognisable.
We have seen across the last 18 months, and particularly in recent weeks, the most violent demonstrations in Australian history.
Australians have been turned against Australians.
With hundreds of military personnel on the street, with police blanketing suburbs across Australia now enforcing the equivalent of martial law, not one single Australian politician can produce the evidence that this action is appropriate.
At the same time as Australia has become a laughing stock around the world, with the most excoriating coverage this country has ever attracted. In America, the idea that under Australia’s covid restrictions dogs in animal refuges were being shot rather than given to loving homes touched a sympathetic chord.
Where is the evidence that putting millions of people under house arrest, unable to visit friends and family, unable in many cases to work, destroying many tens of thousands of businesses, throwing vast swathes of the population on to welfare, quadrupling or quintupling the national debt, destroying the education of millions of Australian children, where is the evidence that this is an appropriate response to the coronavirus?
Where is the evidence that instituting curfews on millions of Australians is effective or appropriate?
That’s right, it’s all secret. In Victoria, NSW and Queensland, indeed across the entire country, we’ve seen the same charade of the implementation of draconian law enforcement and massive restrictions on personal liberty, but state and federal governments are all refusing to release the medical evidence on which these decisions are based.
That is, you can institute the most over-the-top lockdowns and destruction of communities seen anywhere in the world, but they can’t justify it. The authorities cannot provide the evidence that they are doing the right thing.
For the simple reason: It doesn’t exist.
An ill informed, frightened and confused Australian population, many of them without the literacy or media skills to know when they are being lied to, have been bludgeoned into accepting the loss of all their freedoms, while unbelievably arrogant and utterly out of touch politicians, many of them earning some 40 or 50 times the income of a welfare recipient, have escaped scott free.
They never meet, except at controlled events during election campaigns, the ordinary working Australians most devastated by their insane and self-aggrandising responses to Covid.
When this is all over, let’s not forget this crisis was man made. That it wasn’t the virus that did all this damage, but governments’ response to it.
It’s the rest of the population that is paying. And paying big time. Millions of people can no longer take care of their families, have lost the pride of running their own businesses and the ability to care for their own families. Are facing massive debts and the destruction of all they have ever worked for.
The Australian government ignored all the cautionary tales emanating from some of the world’s leading tertiary institutions, including Princeton, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, all warning that lockdowns were a dangerous social experiment which went against decades of epidemiological wisdom and would do more harm than good. The result has been an authoritarian derangement, with military on the streets, unprecedented levels of highly aggressive policing, a dramatic loss of liberties, thousands marching in the streets and uber surveillance at a level previously unimaginable.
Under Covid, the rich in Australia are now many billions of dollars richer than they were 18 months ago.
If the Australian government didn’t want to pay any attention to many of the world’s leading disease experts, they only had to go to the Australian National University and one of the country’s most distinguished academics, Professor Ramesh Thakur, who has written extensively on Covid for publications both here and around the world.
He has warned repeatedly that lockdowns were entirely the wrong response. Eminent scientists who urged caution were ignored but have been proven far truer in their projections than the doom-laden death cultists.
To quote him: “The harsh lockdown measures were instituted in response to the fear-mongering projections of mathematical modelling that bear hardly any resemblance to the reality that has unfolded across the world.
“The result has been disastrous for millions of people around the world. Rather than focusing protective measures on the people at heightened risk of illness, governments around the world imposed and continue to impose severe restrictions on their entire population.
“With routine medical care disrupted, businesses shuttered, curfews imposed, travel restricted, socialisation criminalised, we are causing a devastating amount of harm.”
As every day the country descends into a further totalitarian hell, if I have one hope for the book, it is that it marks a white line amidst the chaos that has enveloped us all, that it forces politicians to rethink their actions and for the public to reassess their politicians.
Many people, both in Australia and around the world, were warning, a year or more ago, that the unilateral actions being taken by the authorities would lead to an authoritarian derangement. That’s exactly what is happening in Australia.
It was the world’s most famous whistle blower, Edward Snowden, who warned in May of last year, quote: “Everybody who looks around right now, they can see, they can feel what’s in the air. Everything is changing rapidly. We are seeing new powers being claimed. We are seeing new powers being abused.
“And we are seeing governments tearing open new avenues into our private lives under the justification of emergency measures.
“You know, they always say these are temporary, it is for this reason and that reason… But there is nothing more permanent than a temporary measure. The system is now failing.”
It is not just the political and bureaucratic classes which have behaved so badly, but the media profession itself. As one group of doctors quoted in the book records: “The relentless bombardment of numbers, unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without indicating those numbers, without comparing them with flu deaths in other years, without comparing them with deaths from other causes, has induced true anxiety psychosis in the population.”
It was obvious from very early on that the projected death tolls, the excuse for Scott Morrison placing himself front and centre of the fear campaign, the rationale behind the massive destruction of Australian life, was false.
Why did no one call him out? Not his political comrades in arms. Not his wealthy political donors. Not the premiers now shutting down their entire states and masquerading as heroes of the moment. Not the senior bureaucrats peddling a message of alarmism; and only very, very few in the nation’s media.
Politicians ignored all the warnings, seized the advice that suited them and have absolutely destroyed the country. Goodbye democracy. Goodbye decency.
