The global pandemic has required extraordinary measures to safeguard our rights to life and health. These efforts have come at the expense of civil liberties with government restrictions of fundamental democratic rights such as our freedom to gather, move freely and even work. Our nation looks different with police in the spotlight, defence forces called in and new rules and regulations imposed in an instant. We asked our experts the following question: What does a “State of Disaster” mean for our civil liberties?
Gerry Georgatos
Civil liberties are cumulatively won, in small steps of intense struggle, through great sacrifice. Any State of Disaster must always be a procedural process that does not risk civil liberties. There is an inherent investiture of faith in the warrant of governments to enable self-evident emergency responses.
Nations, without exception, have been deceived or misled into wars. Nations have been deceived or rushed into domestic emergency responses and on occasion have suspended natural justice and domestic laws.
The justification for Victoria’s State of Disaster is to prevent an escalation of a life-threatening viral transmission. This is a lawfully just argument – and it is a common good tenet.
However, both governments and the media must bend over backwards, with rapidity, to ensure all sides are heard, to respond to all questions and not hold stoic to premises, but to substantiate in full, not in part, the urgency. There is significant harm in dismissing people as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crack-pots’. Their questions can be answered and hence we do away with avoidable dissent and pitchfork standoffs.
Preventing avoidable deaths, mitigating the spread of a deadly virus is social justice, is human rights, is lawful. Prosecuting the case for the measures and reasons must be better evidenced and more educatively disseminated than what has been. When we shortcut to the execution of the warrant for a suspension or restriction of living practices which we take for granted, we significantly risk the erosion of all forms of civil liberties and social justices.
Gerry Georgatos is the national coordinator, National Suicide Prevention & Trauma Recovery. He has among his qualifications a Master in Social Justice & Civil Rights Arbitration and a Master in Human Rights Education.
Bill Papastergiadis
COVID-19 has attacked us in more ways than one. It’s affect on people’s health and lives is the foremost concern. Quietly, it has moved amongst us and has taken from us our loved ones, generally our most vulnerable.
Equally it’s been an assault on our emotional health. The uncertainty of the virus’ end and how it will strike us has changed fundamentally the way we relate to one another. I enjoyed hugging my friends when greeting them. It was my connection. I’m not even allowed to now shake hands. Emotionally it’s withdrawn us from one another.
However, it’s not just the physical and emotional journey that we have all been sent on. Our way of life, the liberties we expect automatically have vanished. It’s hard to understand that we can no longer travel to see our family. My 84-year-old mother lies in wait for my daily phone call. On picking up the phone my mother says to me: “Will it ever be the same? Will you be okay? Will I see my grandchildren?” It’s the same conversation every time I call.
My daughter is doing a VCE subject and has friends in need of company after a VCE test. They long for an embrace after an exam and some reassurance. She can’t be there for them. The anxiety is thick in the air. My daughter stoically shrugs and says to me “We will be fine”. I know she digs deep to say these words as she too looks at me knowing I’m on my own journey- at home and not at work. Normal healthy people now strangely anxious.
I was once proud of my law firm and the energy in the corridors. I walked the offices and heard the stories and often on Fridays the enthusiasm of the weekend of fun they my staff had planned. Voices, laughter and energy pulsating. We felt alive. On Wednesday night we locked the doors. I walked out Wednesday from a normally almost 200 person firm, alone.
I need a Permit to leave home. How can that be? I wanted to go for a walk with a fried Jim Bosinakis. We studied our maps. Were we within 5 km of each other?
But this is nothing compared to the pain that people experienced losing loved ones in a nursing home. I cherished holding my father’s hand each day when he was in a nursing home not so long ago. It was my pact to be there every day no matter what time. As my friend Tripidakis said to me, “Even five minutes a day with your dad is enough. But it has to be every day”. To think that today and yesterday we had elderly die alone in nursing homes. Unimaginable distress for everyone.
So COVID-19 has been more than a physical health challenge. It’s destroyed the fabric of our emotional connections. For that is the purpose of our life … to bond with one another.
Bill Papastergiadis is a lawyer and also the President of the Greek Community of Melbourne.
George Zangalis
The declaration of Victoria to stage-four lockdown and a state of disaster means severe restrictions in people’s engagement with fundamental human needs – civil rights – such as work, study, travel, socialising, entertainment, movement, etc. For many it means serious psychological problems.
But it also challenges us to reflect and consider the relationship between hard won rights and life-saving responsibilities. And in this case the latter has and should have priority both in terms of combating the virus and the establishment of a health system publicly owned, freely accessible, well-funded and multicultural and multilingual.
George Zangalis is the Honorary President of the Public Transport Union, Vice President of the Fair Go For Pensioners Coalition, founding member of FECCA, the ECCV and Ethnic Community Broadcasting, broadcaster, and a regular contributor to sociopolitical issues, especially those that concern migrant workers and policies and campaigns that are relevant to ethnic minorities.
