The Australian Senate voted to establish a parliamentary inquiry into the nation’s excess deaths today, giving the green light to what is possibly the first inquiry of this nature in the world.
One year and five motions is what it took for Senator Ralph Babet, of the United Australia Party, to finally get the go-ahead on the inquiry.
Senator Babet tabled two unsuccessful motions calling for an inquiry into Australia’s excess mortality last March, followed by another unsuccessful motion in February of this year.
Several weeks later, his fourth motion calling for the Senate to acknowledge the need for an inquiry scraped through with a win, marking a shift in attitude within the Senate and paving the way for today’s vote to finally establish an inquiry.
“Fifth time’s the charm!” said Senator Babet in a statement after his motion passed successfully.
“This appears to be a world-first inquiry for what is a global issue. May this committee process give a voice to the family members of the deceased and deliver the answers that our nation so desperately needs.”
The successful motion, co-sponsored by independent Senators Jacqui Lambie and David Pocock, calls for the Community Affairs References Committee to conduct an inquiry into factors contributing to excess mortality in 2021-2023 and to make recommendations on how to address them.
The vote was won 31:30 with only the Left-wing Labor Party and the Greens opposing the motion (see full breakdown here).
The phenomenon of excess all-cause mortality is an issue for nations all around the world since the pandemic kicked off in 2020, yet governments have shown little interest or initiative in investigating why or what to do about it.
Australia saw record-high excess mortality throughout the pandemic, peaking at 11.7% above the expected baseline in 2022. This number was initially touted to be as high as 15%, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revised its excess death numbers down with the adoption of new modelling in 2023.
Though 2023 saw fewer excess deaths, the ABS reports that the excess was “sustained” and “statistically significant” into the first half of 2023.
Figures released by the ABS just today show the majority of 2023 deaths sitting above the baseline range, although mortality did come within baseline range during weeks 31 – 43.
Cancer remains the leading cause of death in Australia, accounting for around a third of all deaths year on year, followed by dementia, respiratory disease and heart disease. In 2022, Covid was the sixth-leading cause of death, falling to eighth in 2023.
Naturally, some of the excess deaths seen in Australia and around the world are attributable to Covid, but the virus cannot account for all of the excess mortality. In fact, the lax criteria for attribution of deaths to Covid means that the impact of the virus on excess mortality is probably overestimated.
Initially, the ABS differentiated between deaths due to Covid alone and deaths with other causal factors, revealing that just 8.6% of deaths with Covid were caused solely by the virus. Subsequently, this reporting method was done away with, and all deaths with a causal sequence of events deemed to originate with Covid (including with pre-existing chronic conditions) were swept into the ‘due to Covid’ category, taking the accounting of deaths due to Covid from 8% to approximately 80%.
Even so, an analysis of 2022 excess mortality by Australia’s peak actuarial body, the Actuaries Institute, pinned only half of Australia’s excess deaths on Covid.
That leaves the rest of the excess mortality unexplained.
The actuaries suggest that other factors driving Australia’s excess deaths may include: mortality displacement, undiagnosed Covid, mental health issues and unhealthy pandemic-influenced lifestyle changes. Note that the latter two are documented knock-on effects of Government pandemic policies.
An independent excess death probe led by the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS) highlighted the impact of the Covid vaccination programme as another potential driver of excess mortality.
One particularly interesting report featured in the AMPS inquiry was an Australian study of all-cause mortality trends conducted on the pre-Covid but post-vaccinated Queensland population. The analysis showed that deaths started trending upwards with the Covid vaccine rollout, not Covid.
While the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) officially acknowledges only 14 deaths related to the Covid vaccines, there were over 1,020 reported deaths and over 140,000 injuries recorded in the DAEN, Australia’s safety surveillance database, as at March 12th 2024.
As underreporting is a well-known feature of such safety surveillance systems, the true extent of harm from the Covid vaccines is unknown but may be significantly higher.
The TGA admitted as much when, in September last year, the regulator refused to say how many of the adverse events reported to the DAEN it had determined to be causally linked to the Covid vaccines, but let slip that the TGA assigns almost all reports a causality status of “possible”, neither confirming nor denying causality.
Other potential contributors to excess mortality may include harms arising from the pandemic response, including lockdowns, isolation, loss of employment, loss of autonomy and increased stress, all of which were raised in submissions to an inquiry into Terms of Reference for a Covid Royal Commission.
Australia’s inquiry into excess deaths will likely consider all this and more. The Committee is expected to provide its report by August 31st 2024.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnettt’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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“According to the Foundations’ survey, 35% of 18-35 years-olds around the world say that having a leader who “doesn’t bother with parliaments or elections” is a good way of running a country (the highest of any age group).”
But that IS democracy in Western Countries.
And deliberately so, it seems to me.
I would think that nothing pleases the global oligarchy more than an upcoming generation that is all too happy to have them running everything without the hassle of the pretence of democracy.
Good point. That is what PASSES for democracy.
I’m sure just because they believe it’s a good idea at the moment the future will teach them a hard lesson and war or rebellion is the only way to put their mistake right, time will tell, history tends to repeat itself!
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
I think we’re generally in agreement on our position in the cycle right now.
Although I must say that Dorothy Byrne looks like she’s been enjoying some good times in her local cake shop. Right after she cleaned out the pie shop next door.
Actually, just to continue my conversation with myself, and doing my bit for equal rights, feminism, blah blah blah, I’m thinking you could quite easily refine Hopf’s famous quote thusly:
Hard times create skinny women. Skinny women create good times (I have a long-running disagreement with both Queen and Spinal Tap on this issue.) Good times create fat birds. And fat birds make everyone miserable.
That made me chuckle
I concur
In my experience skinny women are no fun at all – give me a dormouse in preference to a shrew any time.
Thanks for the laugh
LOL
Harsh, but fair.
I’ve got to say that’s the best laugh I had all day. And your “Good times create fat birds…2 version below
That’s an excellent statment
Considering this, the serious hard time Germans went through from 1914 – 1918, soldiers and civilians alike, should have created strong men which ought to have created good times. The creation of the latter whas the third reich, whose good times ought to have created weak men which – in turn – should have created hard times …
This statement is a nonsensical witticism even a cursory look at history easily reveals as such.
My apologies. I shall endeavour to do better tomorrow, Sir.
This O tempora, o mores! howling from the fringe parts of the still pretty much US-dominated internet is usually not particularly sensible, not the least because it’s designed to undermines those it’s also designed to appeal to. The essence of this particular meme is just defeatism — our problems are due to us living in good times and we really deserve to be punished for that!¹ In reality, our problems are a sign of our times very much warranting improvement and we ought to address them instead of whining about their inevitableness.
¹ Another repurposed ‘Christian meme’ …
Yeah I think Shimpling is being mildly ironic in ‘apologising’ to you, RW. (‘Not least because’ – not “not the least because”, by the way)
Oh, really?
I’m not sure that’s the case. The statement merely points out the cyclical nature of stress and consequence. To me the privations of WW1 and the armistice settlement led to the 3rd Reich which by comparison was better that what had gone before. Somehow the strong men became weak and too self assured and failed to leverage the national gain, squandering it on the Eastern Front and a few other mistakes.
But as we know from climate change cyclical phenomena are not simple and obvious and have to be analysed to see the pattern.
Heuristics are notoriously imperfect.
Oh belt up RW! A bit of humour is a great antidote. We hear from you and your questionable grammar constantly; this has started humourously – let it continue that way – for five bloody minutes!
Of course – but I’m sooooo triggered by your patriarchal failure to recognise the part played by women, inherent in that comment.
A result that could trend…
Since there is rarely any real choice between policies, agendas of globalists are taken up by both leftists and rightists, elections are riddled with corruption, polls are fixed (and elections a la US 2020, politicians use state funds to line their own and selected pockets of corporations that fund their election runs, they never accomplish anything, print and spend into inflation, mismanage borders, lecture everyone on globalist norms, climate lies, while jetting around to international conferences while ignoring their nation’s failing services, mandate poisonous injections, demand you get fingerprinted and face scanned when you cross borders…
Yeah it’s getting ripe for Dictators everywhere. But we have totalitarianism now so…
Yep——These young people who imagine they live in a democracy are already being dictated to. Their governments that they think are not making the right decisions are also being dictated to by the globalist treaties they all sign up to. We already live in a dictatorship. Voting just gives the illusion of choice.
“And then one day, for no reason at all, people voted Hitler into power.”
Hitler really only got about a third of the popular vote. It was through backroom dealmaking that he became chancellor.
Excellent article.
This isn’t news.
https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/
shows us that the turnout among young potential voters at the 2019 election was around 50%. The other half did not engage with the process of democratically electing their MP.
I think we’re past worrying. We know we’re screwed. It’s not just the young. Lots of people of all ages just snoozing through the destruction of our civilisation.
It’s seems worthwhile to repeat here that the great Brexvote ended 49:51 in favour of leaving, presumably mainly due to Londoners not voting because of bad weather (that’s a guess of mine — I have no real information of that). It follows that about half of the population was taken for a Brex ride very much against their declared will. Does it surprise you that such events, combined with Only Brex is democratic, SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP, YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINIONS!!27 rants like the above, even claiming that Johnson’s Brex it harder! government was secretly working against it, has weakened trust in so-called democracy?
It’s perhaps time to pull your head out of your Brex and realize that the other half of the population matters, too.
I voted Remain, though not out of any serious conviction; on the plus side I selfishly liked the idea of being able to move somewhere warmer at some point in the future, on the down side, who wants another layer of parasitical bureaucracy telling you what you can and can’t do, and paying for the privilege, and those cookie warnings on every website… don’t get me started.
The whole Bus thing entirely passed me by.
But still, I picked up on the mood music in the MSM, and the predictions of doom, and I ticked the Remain box.
Perhaps it was because I didn’t really care, but on finding out that Leave had won, I just thought to myself, OK, that’s the decision, let’s get on with it. We had a vote, side A won, now we all get behind it.
But that’s not what happened. It suddenly seemed as if a good proportion of the population were behaving like toddlers having a tantrum. I didn’t like these people, or this attitude. These were not people I wished to be associated with.
I don’t regret voting Remain, but if another referendum were held tomorrow, I’d vote Leave. I feel no animus toward people who arrive at a different decision.
As (at that time) German living in the UK exercising so-called treaty rights, I belonged to the group of objects which were being voted upon. I agree with the toddlers/ trantrum observation except that I’m seeing it on the other side — the winners are still busy telling the undesirable half of the population who dared to disagree with them that they – at best – people who’ve been played for a fool by the evil establishment and at at worse, more likely than not, simply evil traitors and enemies of the ‘real’ people.
Incomprehensible. “the group of objects which were being voted upoon”??? What the hell are you on about? There was a vote. One side lost, the other side won. That’s how democracy is done here. I’ve voted and lost, and voted and won. In your words, Suck it up, buttercup.
There was a vote. It was held by all the right and good people, especially those from Pakistan and Jamaica, and it was about the fate of all the unright and ungood like people. Let’s call them “Poles” to simplify things.
Primitive enough for you?
You don’t need to move anywhere warm, you just need a fat bird to keep you warm.
Been there, done that. After we split up one of my so-called mates admitted that the gang had named the Silentnight hippo and chick after us.
Needless to say, I wasn’t the hippo.
“Against their will”??? When 90% of the media tried to keep them in the EU with endless scaremongering about the dangers of leaving and still failed what more evidence do you require that people wanted to LEAVE? Why should we assume that being part of a political union with 26 other countries is necessary for prosperity and well being and being an Independent country is not? 170 other countries are not in the EU. How are they ever going to manage without being members of the Protection Racket?
Against their declared will. When ignoring the issue of voter turnout, about half of the electorate voted against leaving, hence, this is not an issue of The Evil Establishment™ vs The People™. Despite my official status as income tax cow without any political rights, I sometimes even aspire believe that I belong to the group called people as well.,
EU citizens were able to take advantage of our lax electoral system and vote in the referendum, and I’m sure many of them did. I complained to the Electoral Commission before the referendum – telling them how it was done – and Lord Owen backed up my complaint taking it up directly with them. They weren’t interested.
If only paying tax – as you complain – were a prerequisite for voting. I think that would be fairer.
This was explicitly prohibited. The ‘electorate’ for this ‘vote’ was the people entiteld to vote in so-called general elections, ie, citizens of any Commonwealth country legally in the UK at the time the vote took place, including people with temporary leave to remain. I don’t know if someone bussed in Pakistanis etc for this specific purpose, but doing so had been perfectly legal.
‘aspire to believe…’ Your poor English is exhausting.
Leaving the issue of “not everyone’s a native speaker of English” aside, Schwachkopf, sometimes, a typo is just a typo.
People who harp on about this are like those who want the cup final of 1978 replayed because their team lost. ———I would probably be the same if I could have the 99 Champions league final replayed when my favourite Bayern lost in injury time to Man United. But I have to live in the real world, and accept Bayern lost. —-So did Remainers.
“that’s a guess of mine — I have no real information of that” – You’re expecting to be taken seriously after a comment like that? You’ve herewith forfeited any right to attention from adults. Go back to the Guardian and take you dreadful grammar with you!
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/12/no_author/democracy-the-illusion-of-liberty/
Most people have come to realise that our democracies are just fake democracies.
The PMC is in charge, and there is no real difference between it and the CCP anymore: 5000 like-minded people meeting in various locations to sign off on the pre-agreed upon agenda vs. 5000 such people meeting in 1 location to do the same.
https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/ns-lyons-china-convergence-interview-banger?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=617396&post_id=139726665&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=97oj4&utm_medium=email
Maybe they are just pseudo populists. They see politicians do their own thing and pander to the UN and WEF rather than to their own voters and think a dictator would not have to do that. But ofcourse they could only hope that their dictator would be a benevolent one. —How likely is that?————- If Democracy is broken then fix the democracy, do not clamour for totalitarians. If Capitalism is broken then fix the capitalism, do not clamour for socialists that want to run your life for you and decide what you need and can and cannot have, based on their collectivist world view.
It comes from an unspoken acknowledgment that the democratic method can no longer bring about any sort of redemptive change. This is what happens you get nihilism, a drawing towards extremes, an emotional life so toxic and devoid of hope that human minds become warped and atrophied and lacking in perspective. Terrible augmentations of everyday reality have occured in the last few years. There is no going back and no real faith in any alternative vision. It’s just grasping the nettle and experiencing the pain to the utmost.
If you spent your adolescent years in the late twentieth century you did well because nothing like that is coming back. When writing about the end of literacy Neil Postman talks about how childhood is essentially built upon a literary tradition and he makes a convincing case. There can be no childhood without literature The loss of interest in reading, perhaps its an attention span thing – this is a serious matter because when the nuance of the word breaks down you have to triumph of spectacle which makes totalitarianism much easier. Just the easygoing and endlessly forgiving tempo of literature reminds us of what it is to be human.
Well with Channel 4 now being one of the Establishment’s chief propaganda wings and a device for injecting raw sewage directly into the brains of the youth, this does not surprise me.
They know what’s been done to them and they know that they have been stunted and they know who they really are. They are having to be way more stoical than we ever were they just don’t voice it. If you really care about them then you can easily unlock their energy.
Not just the young. I’m 72 and it is clear that “democracy” as we used to perceive it has gone. The points noted above are absolutely correct.
My parents’ generation must be spinning in their graves at what has been done to us.
Do not comply. Say NO. And always speak the truth, whatever the cost
I think they are being defiant it is in such a way that they decided years ago to keep their mouths shut. Throughout school these days. I am on the side of the young because when I speak to them I do notice a diffidence and withdrawal but at the same time a depth of application to more important issues.
Don’t worry about anything. Either you provde them with leadership or they find it elsewhere. You might be a bit quiet if your leadership has been a tightly and quietly controlled power grab over the last thirty years. You know who you are and the young know who you are. A time comes when you need to take a grasp of things.
That said, at least the majority still don’t. Or do they? Actions speak louder than words. And as we saw in recent years, at least half the population (of all ages) is happy on their knees.
Terrific article.
Another brilliantly simple piece by McGrogan that says it how it is.
But yet they still seem to be the first to scream that democracy has been subverted or threatened whenever someone that they don’t like is voted into power via a democratic vote…