The People's Terms of Reference

for a COVID Royal Commission appear at a Senate Hearing

Well, last week was a very different one for me. I was asked to join a team appearing at an Australian Senate Committee looking at the public responses to the Terms of Reference for a Royal Commission into the COVID response. The Australian government has approved an inquiry, that will be useless for a number of reasons, including that the people appointed to run it were lockdown and mandate enthusiasts and that the responses of the State governments are out of scope. Therefore, a full Royal Commission with appropriate powers is required. This push is led by Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts and has support from many other politicians.

Many groups and individuals around the country made submissions and this hearing of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee was to allow senators to ask questions of the respondents.

Ours was the team that prepared the “People’s Terms of Reference” now with 48,000 co-signatories. I wrote about here.

Former Barrister Julian Gillespie led the team that appeared in Canberra, which included:

• Peter Fam, human rights lawyer;

• Dr Julie Sladden, well-known General Practitioner from Tasmania and who also represents the Australians for Science and Freedom organisation. Julie writes here for the Spectator;

• Professor Ian Brighthope, a physician specialising in nutritional and environmental medicine (Lena, who is naturopath, was delighted to meet him and has been following his teaching for many years);

and then me covering things data.

The video recording of the session can be found here:

https://www.aph.gov.au/News_and_Events/Watch_Read_Listen/ParlView/video/2146605

I must say the staff in the background, who record and organise these sessions, are very professional.  It all works seamlessly. The whole days sessions are recorded. On the timer we started at 10:45 am and finished at 12:18pm. When I get the chance it will be interesting to listen to other sessions and hear other perspectives from the Australian community.

It’s also found on youtube here but in lower resolution (commencing at the 2hr 15min mark and finishes at the 3hr 49min mark).

The chair of the committee is Senator Paul Scarr from Queensland. He is a lawyer by background. I was very impressed with the calm and respectful way which he handled proceedings. Last time we were in Canberra we sat in on a random question time in the senate and heard him speaking eloquently on a sensitive topic.

Senator Scarr thanking the people for attending the session.

Our session was shared with the Queensland Nurses association.

We met Queensland Nurse Ella Leach for the first time, who I’d recently seen in the news here. She has just been fired by Queensland Health for refusing the COVID jab mandate, which, by the way, now does not apply. Ella is 7 months pregnant.

Ella was joined by Kara Thomas who is the AMPS secretary but also President of the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland (NPAQ).

It’s really sad that these people, who would be hugely valuable nurses in the field, are stopped from working by failed bureaucracies that the Australian taxpayer is funding. I never thought I’d witness such stupidity in all my life. In the conversations afterwards and over lunch, with these doctors like Ian Brighthope and Julie Sladden and nurses Ella Leach and Kara Thomas, you get a sense about how much they care about the health of their patients.

It was a delight to meet Ella and witness the energy and drive that she has. We wish her and her husband all the best for the upcoming birth.

The Questions

There was a mix of questions from the Senators from very intelligent to irrelevant.

There was some time wasting from one of the Senators who seemed to be confused who “The People” were. Julian gives a good answer.

At 11:40:25 Senator Shoebridge tries to label the team as conspiracy theorists. He asked: did we individually accept the enormous public health benefits of vaccines such as polio, measles, tetanus and influenza?

Of course this had no relevance to the matter at hand. The following came to mind.

Admiral Akbar senses what is going on.

Since the event I have thought of a lot of ways to answer that question. In my answer at the committee, I focus on the adverse event profiles, rather than the benefits, of medicines and tell him that we have to compare the vaccines he mentions with COVID vaccines. I was trying to get out one of my facts that that 70% of all adverse events involving chest pain over the 53 year history of the DAEN for ALL medicines have occurred from COVID vaccines. I think I got there although he didn’t want to listen. At least it’s on the record.

Kara gave the simplest and best answer to his question which was: “I’m here for a Royal Commission into the COVID response”. The Senator gave up at that point.

The Senator also refers to a paper in the Lancet (June 2022) that purports to show how many lives have been saved by COVID vaccines. We find out it’s a modelling paper and Senator Rennick loses it. He knows the paper referred to and apparently its funded by the Gates Foundation and GAVI.

I’m not sure which paper it is but we took it on notice and will have a chance to respond. And by the way if any of you dear readers, who listened to the broadcast or watched the recording, have any useful responses or references, please feed them back. We have approximately 3 weeks to respond back to the Committee with information we offered to provide on notice, in writing.

There’s so much to unpack from the session but the interaction with Nurse Ella that has been clipped out in this tweet is important. It was a discussion about the information given regarding vaccination during pregnancy. The Senator’s response right at the end of the session is concerning. Some of the comments to the tweet are interesting, some are from trolls so ignore.

I said the Chair, Paul Scarr, handled the session really well. Towards the end of the session he takes it on himself to ask some specific questions of Nurse Ella regarding the terminations of nurses. You can see that he is concerned about the way it has been done and asks appropriate questions to find out exactly what went on. That’s what we hope of our politicians, to delve in and find the truth.

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I’ll be posting another article shortly with an update on excess mortality that I have been asked to provide for another matter. We didn’t get a chance to discuss much about excess mortality in the Committee session although Senator Rennick asks a very pertinent question which I’ll go into in the next article. I’ll also address a recent post from John Campbell where Our World in Data is saying that Australia’s excess mortality is back to normal, which a few people have asked me about.

See you soon.