Covid vaccine mandates enforced on Queensland police and ambulance workers were declared “unlawful” in a landmark Supreme Court ruling this week.
In a decision handed down on Tuesday, Justice Glenn Martin of the Queensland Supreme Court found the Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll’s direction for mandatory Covid vaccination, issued in December 2021, to be unlawful under the Human Rights Act.
A similar Covid vaccination order issued by the Director-General of Queensland Health at the time, John Wakefield, was determined to be “of no effect”, with enforcement of both mandates and any related disciplinary actions to be banned.
Justice Martin held that the Police Commissioner “did not consider the human rights ramifications” before issuing the Covid workplace vaccination directive within the Queensland Police Service (QPS).
While the Covid vaccination directive to Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS) workers was found to be lawful, Justice Martin said that the Director-General had failed to “establish that the direction he made is a term of employment of the applicants”.
Justice Martin chastised the Commissioner and the Director-General for their inflexibility in the implementation of vaccination directives and suggested that their actions were not properly supported by the evidence.
“Neither the Commissioner nor Dr. Wakefield gave close attention to the possible range of solutions. Each was presented with a proposal for mandatory vaccination with little in the way of well-developed critiques of alternative means of reducing illness and infection,” stated Justice Martin in the decision.
Moreover, justifications offered by the Commissioner and the Director-General for the workplace vaccination mandates, were “taken out of context” or “not supported by the evidence”, while modelling relied upon by the Commissioner was in fact “nothing of the sort”, said Justice Martin.
Tip of the iceberg?
The decision, which resolved three lawsuits brought by law firms Alexander Law and Sibley Lawyers, is the “tip of the iceberg”, said Bond University Associate Law Professor Wendy Bonyton.
Prof. Bonyton told the Australian: “There are other cases, based on similar grounds, similarly challenging the legitimacy of directions given during the pandemic. This one is interesting because it is the first one to go through… There will be more of these cases to come.”
Australian businessman and founder of the United Australia Party, Clive Palmer, who reportedly contributed between $2.5 to $3 million towards funding the lawsuits involving 74 police officers, civilian staff and paramedics, said he is considering further legal action following yesterday’s win.
“We could look at the class action for the ambulance workers and the police workers who have been subjected to harassment by their colleagues at the police department on the direction of the Government to try to drop this case,” he told the press outside the Brisbane Supreme Court after the decision was handed down.
Condemning the Government for its “coercion and bullying”, Palmer paid tribute to the police and healthcare workers for their “extreme courage” in resisting the Covid vaccine workplace directives.
“Unlawful”, but not a breach of human rights
Human rights lawyer Peter Fam, of Sydney law firm Maat’s Method, praised the Supreme Court decision.
“This decision will force future employers and Government officials to properly consider human rights when implementing vaccine directions in future, at least in Queensland where there is a Human Rights Act which obligates them to do so,” he told Dystopian Down Under.
Fam noted that Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory have similar human rights legislation, but other states and territories do not.
However, Fam cautioned that the Court decision has an “ominous” caveat.
“They won because the Commissioner did not appropriately consider the human rights advice she received. However, the court also found that although each of the directions limited the workers’ rights to full, free and informed consent (under Section 17 of the Human Rights Act), the limit was reasonable in all the circumstances.
“So, if the Commissioner could have proved that she had considered the advice she received regarding human rights, her workplace vaccination directives would likely have been considered lawful.”
Fam gave his full assessment of the Supreme Court decision in a video published to his Substack today.
In a Senate hearing on February 1st of this year, Fam testified that a range of human rights were violated by vaccine mandates and other aspects of Australia’s pandemic response, which he said warranted investigation in a Covid Royal Commission.
Queensland Health responds
The Queensland Health Minister, Shannon Fentiman, has responded to the Supreme Court ruling, saying that the Government is still considering its implications.
“The point that I want Queenslanders to know, is that his Honour did find that placing a limit on human rights around mandatory Covid vaccinations was not contrary to human rights, and in fact it was justified given that we were in the middle of a pandemic.”
Fentiman emphasised that the ruling did not find mandatory Covid vaccinations contrary to human rights, but rather that the directions had been issued unlawfully.
Of the QAS Covid vaccination mandate, Fentiman said: “It was lawful, and it was compatible with human rights, but there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that it was a reasonable direction under the employment contract.”
Fentiman added that Queensland Health staff have “nothing to do with this case”.
Nurses and doctors still subject to mandates and disciplinary action
While the Queensland Police and Ambulance Services are now prohibited from enforcing Covid vaccine mandates or related disciplinary action, a spokesperson for the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland (NPAQ) advises that mandates remain in place for some nurses, midwives and doctors.
Even where mandates have been dropped, Queensland Health has come under fire for continuing to discipline and even fire healthcare workers as recently as January 2024 for failing to comply with vaccination directives issued in late 2021.
President of the NPAQ, Kara Thomas, said that the Supreme Court ruling confirms the union’s position that “workers had human rights that needed to be considered”.
“We have nurses and midwives sitting at home during a workforce crisis and the healthcare system’s unlawful decisions are directly to blame,” said Thomas.
“We are currently consulting with our lawyers to determine what these two decisions mean for our Queensland members who were dismissed.”
Vice-President of the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), Dr. Duncan Syme, called for the reinstatement of doctors who have been pushed out of practice due to “unlawful” vaccine mandates.
“Doctors who were mandated, resigned or retired early should be immediately reinstated, compensated, and any professional misconduct charges related to challenging the mandates must be removed from their registration.”
“It’s high time we prioritise the well-being of patients using ethical evidence-based medicine over political-based directives,” he said.
Decision marks important precedent
The Supreme Court ruling has been touted as an important precedent as it highlights that human rights must be properly considered in the issuing and implementation of workplace directives.
Prior to this ruling, lawsuits challenging vaccine mandates have not been successful in the Australian courts, with judges tending to side with the Government and employers who enforced the mandates on employees.
One well-known case is Kassam V Hazzard (2021), which challenged New South Wales (NSW) Health Minister Brad Hazzard’s vaccine mandates and movement restrictions. The challenge, brought by Tony Nikolic, of Sydney law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates, was dismissed, with Justice Beech-Jones ruling that public health orders were legally valid.
Responding to the Supreme Court ruling, Nikolic told Dystopian Down Under: “The Queensland decision is a vindication of human rights and the importance human rights possess in Australian jurisprudence.”
“It is most unfortunate that the approach taken by the NSW Supreme Court in the case of Kassam v Hazard (2021) assumed a narrow approach on human rights protections under the common law,” said Nikolic, noting that unlike Queensland, NSW, has no bill of rights or Human Rights Act.
“In circumstances where former Health Minister Greg Hunt indicated that this was the world’s largest clinical trial, the Courts should have provided greater protections for human rights. This decision highlights the need for an Australian Human Rights Act or Bill of Rights.”
The historic Supreme Court ruling comes after another landmark decision in the South Australian courts in January, in which the Department of Child Protection was ordered to pay compensation to a youth worker who developed pericarditis after getting a Covid booster under a workplace vaccination directive.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnettt’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘…..scenarios were often wrongly treated by many as forecasts’
The usual cop out through semantics.
If the scenarios were not forecasts, then they were completely pointless. Why bother with them if they have no predictive value?
Utterly useless for planning purposes, as we have seen time after time after time……
What a complete shower…..!
Just like the Climatrons when their predictions failed to materialise, they relabelled them ‘projection’.
And also like the Climatrons, all reliant on modelling.
A proper scenario would be to compare the spread of an epidemic with perfect mixing to one with limited mixing. That would show that flattening the curve leads to the epidemic lasting a lot longer and resulting in large amounts of herd immunity. Hence small amounts of acquired immunity so that when you unlock you just get another wave.
Those “many” included, at the time, Whitty and Vallance and pretty much the entirety of SAGE, if I remember rightly.
‘….is the decline in independence the effect of SARS-CoV-2 or the effect of the restrictions?’
Quite clearly an effect of the restrictions and the vaccinations which, certainly in this household have, via giant cell arteritis and its steroid treatment, caused one family member to contract severe dementia and complete loss of independence.
Incandescent at the simperings of so many buffoons at this worryingly misdirected enquiry…..
Saddest of all is that, no matter what you think about lockdowns and restrictions and their importance for covid control, there was nothing to stop the over 50s (hardly old, but then I would say that when I’m in my mid-40s) or over 75s from leaving the house daily for a walk – other than the incessant fear porn of course. You could pretty much guarantee a brisk hour’s walk would not result in a covid infection. So not only did they not avoid covid by staying at home (and probably then caught it in hospital in the following months when requiring treatment for illnesses or injury caused by inactivity), they also reduced the quality and quantity of the rest of their lives, not to mention the burden on Our NHS.
No one was prevented from catching anything by staying at home. Airbourne, therefore by definition everywhere. Perhaps a good vacuum chamber would have been effective, but only at killing people. Masks, useless. Lockdown useless and harmful. All the effective things were banned, Ivermectin, and lots of other drugs. However the experiment was a success, vaccinating people without full disclosure, improper testing (actually almost none and there were deaths reported, and ignored). That is usually called Genocide by deceit.
None of these models ever seem to take into consideration the fact that only a small percentage of people exposed to a pathogen actually develop any sort of illness. I guess that is by design so they can claim their interventions work when not every single person in the world gets sick at the same time.
And the dead totals from Rona are bollocks. They include the fake tests and dying from something else but having a ‘symptom’ of Rona so the Quacks can attach Rona to the death cert and collect money – evthg was paid. But I doubt the money for Rona theme, will make an appearance in this sham confirmation er sorry, ‘inquiry’.
230 K did not die from Rona. 20-30 k died from and only from Rona. The rest were falsified numbers, including older people murdered with Midazolam (30 K?) but blamed on Rona.
This ‘inquiry’ is f*ing propaganda and about as real as the ‘science’ of Rona.
And didn’t they relax the rules for writing out certificates? Almost back to the Harold Shipman days – he would have made full advantage of it.
Yes that was mentioned in the book ‘Pseudo Pandemic’, New Normal Technocracy. Memory is a bit hazy but that was mentioned in the book that laws that were put in place post Harrold Shipman were relaxed.
Doctors were instructed to add Covid unless they could prove the patient did NOT have it. Hm…
They never seem to do any model validation as that would probably invalidate their model.
Surely you have realised that any of these computer models from Imperial are entirely fixed to produce the desired result? 500,000 deaths we the claim, at a cost of a few million quid I expect.
What Imperial College produced was not evidence. It was madey-uppy shite.
And as the headline draws attention to it: The virus could not have ‘continued to grow exponentially’ because it never started to grow exponentially. Death data which would have been available to planners (though it was not available to the general public until a few days later) up to the lockdown announcement showed that the rate of increase was already slowing – it never was increasing exponentially. That data showing the slowing of the rate of increase pointed to a peak in deaths occurring around 6 April – the peak was actually on 8 April.
The death data available up to the lockdown announcement on 23rd March pointed to a peak in early April which was already inevitable because the infections leading to those deaths had already occurred.
Sorry (not sorry) to keep banging this drum:
It was not exponential:
The above chart shows a best-fit exponential for the death data for England and Wales to 23 March 2020 and also the deaths where Covid was ‘mentioned’ on the certificate.
The planners should have trusted this empirical evidence:
The above chart shows change in rate of increase in 3-day average death count for England and Wales up to the peak on 8 April 2020. The red shows deaths that occurred before the lockdown announcement and the blue post lockdown. The red trend line reaches zero (the peak, no further increase in rate) on 6 April 2020 – two days earlier than what actually happened.
That’s what they should have done: Trust the Evidence
Not only was it not exponential but this has been known for several generations. Exponential growth in a finite world breaks realizability (a.k.a. common sense) when the number of infected is greater than the number of susceptible. And on to infinity. Reductio ad absurdum.
Being a deterministic process some event has to happen to kick it off the curve and onto a sensible one. This has to happen in an uncontrived way. Or, by Occam’s razor, it was never growing exponentially in the first place. For example the standard SIR model of 1927 vintage doesn’t grow exponentially. i.e. The model that is the basis for all the Covid modelling.
Of course an epidemic is a stochastic process. Its growth happens to be exponential multiplied by a logit-normal distribution with expected value corresponding to the standard SIR model. Remember one infects two who infect four. Or do the two try to infect each other and the first one?
More on YouTube
Also, phone calls to the covid phone line had peaked before any restrictions could have had an impact. Chris Whitty knows the first wave had peaked before restrictions could have had an impact. No doubt he’ll be correcting the Lead Counsel’s mistake.
No doubt he’ll be correcting the Lead Counsel’s mistake.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.
I remember Owen Jones arguing with Peter Hitchens about that….The fact that the curve was already decreasing is not an argument for Lockdown, but against.
Mmm, I take your point but we mustn’t give an easy target to the lockdowners. The rate of increase in deaths was slowing and It’s certainly an argument against lockdown. The daily rate of increase started at around 100% – ie double the number of deaths in the first day but by the end of the first week we were ‘only’ getting about 50% more deaths each day and by the time of the lockdown announcement we were getting around 20% more deaths each day. We reached the peak and the point that the number of deaths each day began to decline on 8 April.
With an average lead time of around 27days from infection to death (for those poor people who died) the infections leading to the deaths on 8 April were happening around 11th/12th March – ie before lockdown.
It’s not an inquiry. It’s a stage play from the same team that brought you the “covid pandemic”.
Shameless as well. We can all see the public inquiries going on in other nations that are actually savaging the establishment rather than slapping it on the back.
I wasn’t aware of that. Whereabouts?
From memory the Aussies and Americans. Seem to remember the Germans getting some good scrutiny.
Rand Paul has been giving Fauci a good grilling, for sure.
Never mind the conclusions, the whole thing is based on a false premise – that there was a “deadly pandemic” that constituted a “public health emergency”.
Whitty agreed with Prof Simon Wood, of Bristol Uni, that cases had peaked in advance of Lockdown 1.
Keith is trying to rewrite history. It’s not contentious that as cases had peaked before Lockdown then there was never a chance of runaway infections.
Yes didn’t Whitty say this to MPs?
“ it was almost assumed that what they would need was palliative care and that that should be provided in the care home rather than it being possible for them to be admitted to hospital for treatment”…..And with family members not aloud to enter, and Drs that can diagnose over a zoom call, it was fertile ground to bump up the ‘covid’ death numbers.
Aka virus spreads via permanent chains of transmission.
Nice idea, obviously loved by bigpharma, but patently false – which is why lockdowns, masks, distancing don’t really work.
Back to the drawing board you germ theory enthusiasts –
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29
Also –
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra070553
If the NHS, sorry the governments propaganda health machine, actually cared about keeping us healthy they might try extolling the virtues of Viatamin D3/K2.
Also bear in mind that Hancock said, in Parliament, Vitamin D doesn’t work. May hell welcome him and his ilk with open arms.
Deciphering the bit about modelling and forecasting is actually not that difficult. A model is a computer simulation of some complex scenario which takes a set of input assumptions and calculates an output from that. Eg, if we assume that we’ll see 8000 COVID deaths next Wednesday given an assumed infection rate of 2.7182818 and assume that holding school sessions under water with triple-tested kids wearing two masks below their scuba gear reduces the infection rate at a speed of 0.049787 per day, how many deaths will the instead get next Wednesday? The important thing here is that this is a theoretical test of the effects some real world measure based on assumptions, ie, it’s all hypothetical and meant to be this way.
Of course, all of these subtle details will get lost when this is translated into headlines which will then shriek 8000 COVID deaths next Wednesday unless schools session immediately moved under water! But that’s certainly entirely unintentional and by no means meant to frighten anyone into actually supporting this proposal.
I have to take exception to the word exponentially, as used so often in fear-mongering.
Exponentially means increase at a continually increasing rate – or happening faster and faster – and continuing to infinity.
There are not enough people in the world to sustain an exponential rise in deaths, infections or anything else, however, that said, it does appear that the stupidity of our ruling classes is showing exponential characteristics.
Interesting, and then there is this, slightly off topic but still covid related.
https://youtu.be/qXglXTxXPlo?si=dGmE9Bmo7SVGYOeB
This “Inquiry” has one purpose only:
to absolve The Establishment from deliberately wrecking the economy and ruining millions of lives over a virus THEY ALREADY KNEW had very low mortality rates and who was vulnerable.
One does need to remember that the Barrister for the enquiry is there to represent the Government. Do not believe a word Mr Keith says. He is there to argue against any Government blame, and he will try very hard. The other side need to push very hard indeed for direct proof of every word presented, by all witnesses.