Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party has persisted and prevailed.
This was the fourth time that I moved a motion around excess mortality. The first three failed, but fourth time lucky!
My successful motion read as follows - The Senate acknowledges that:
(a) the concerning number of excess deaths observed in Australia in 2021 and 2022 has continued into 2023 as evidenced by all-cause provisional mortality data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics; and
(b) there is a need for further inquiry as to the reasons for these excess deaths.
The majority of senators agreed with my motion with 31 supporting and 30 opposing.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time any parliament in the world has admitted that excess deaths are worthy of inquiry.
While this is undoubtedly a significant step towards a full royal commission I'm cautious in my optimism as to what might flow from it. The vote was won with the support of four independent Senators - two of which vote in such haphazard fashion that they may well decide their intentions every morning with a coin flip when they get out of bed. Another, Lidia 'Look at MEEEEE' Thorpe, is as volatile as sweaty dynamite. Even the Australian Greens have parted company with Lidiot. Whatever good she did in Canberra this week, this tantrum in the Senate will be far better remembered.
Nevertheless, a win is a win. The numbers supporting Senator Babet indicate that all Liberal Senators were with him too - given that the Libs were the party in power when the covid crap first hit the fan, this is a step (I hope) toward acknowledging the former government's errors. This is likely to be somewhat easier now that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison is making his political exit.
In other covid news from the land formerly known as Lockdownunder, the Queensland Supreme Court has ruled this week that vaccine mandates imposed on police and ambulance workers were unlawful. This is obviously a win, but a win with an asterisk. As pointed out by Peter Fam, here, the decision is not that the mandates were wrong in themselves, but that Police Commissioner Katrina Carroll did not consider their human rights implications when she imposed them. Had she done so the Court would have presumably waved her through with a thumbs up. Look forward to any future mandate being imposed with a preamble. 'After considering the human rights implications...' Expect widely varying depths of sincerity, from shallow to nanometric.
But Peter Fam adds this tantalizing footnote: A huge congratulations is owed to the plaintiffs as well as Alexander Law and Sibley Lawyers who ran the case. Special shout out to Counsel for the Applicants who exposed the (former) Qld Police Commissioner on several occasions as either lying or negligent, or both.
I'm going to need a court transcript!
And there's some more backtracking to report. Dr 'I haven't practiced medicine for years but I'm a great doctor for tv' Norman Swan, who seems to have been at yes and no on the vaccines, depending on the tides and the position of Neptune, is at no again. Sort of.
Maybe three parts yes and one part no.
ABC health expert Norman Swan has admitted the Covid vaccines produced unexpected side effects but considers them to be akin to 'winning the lotto three times in your lifetime'.
Dr Swan was commenting on the largest ever study done into adverse reactions from Covid vaccines which was published last week.
'They uncovered side effects they hadn't quite expected and they did show up as a signal there,' Dr Swan told ABC interviewer Jeremy Fernandez on Monday.
However, Dr Swan stressed that the side effects seen in the study's 99 million subjects who received Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca shots were 'rare'.
Make that nine parts yes and one part no.
Former deputy chief health officer Nick Coatsworth was even more skew-whiff in his recent mea culpa.
We didn't get it wrong promoting the vaccines, but the mandates, yes, I think we did get that wrong.
Mandates bad, vaccines good.
Nick, you'd have more chance of selling an air conditioner to an Eskimo.
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