On many occasions in the last year I have addressed the Senate in regard to freedom as a counterbalance to medical tyranny. And I recently addressed the Canberra Freedom Rally, remotely. The side that is locking people up for the crime of being healthy, arresting protesters, pepper spraying kids, beating up grannies, banning books and electronic messages, censoring social media, sending threatening letters, forcing small businesses to close, urging people to dob in dissenters and banning safe drugs that have worked for 60 years are all on the wrong side of history.

In a frightening development, New South Wales has called in the troops to keep innocent, healthy citizens locked in their homes in what can only be called martial law. Recent freedom marches showed what happens to citizens who exercise their democratic right to protest. People are demonised, hunted down; the media vilifies them to discourage others from questioning the control state. If the government can decide who is free and who is not, then that is not freedom and no-one is free. A crisis will always be found to justify measures designed to protect the government, not the public—a crisis that is as is easy to create as turning up the PCR test from 24 cycles to 42, where a false positive is the most likely outcome, as has occurred.

Actions such as these have created a crisis of confidence in government, and that, fellow citizens, is on the Senate. We are the house of review. We’re tasked with a duty to ensure honesty, transparency and accountability in the government of the day. We have failed in that solemn duty, our duty to our constituents. We have failed those who are yet to vote, our children, who are now being injected with a substance that has not undergone meaningful safety testing. The Liberal, National and Labor parties have colluded to waive these measures through this place, reducing the Senate to the status of a dystopian echo chamber.

Each new restriction, although met with rightful public opposition, has not led to a re-evaluation but, rather, has led the government to crack down even further. The Morrison government is behaving like a gambling addict who loses a hand but doubles down instead of admitting error and walking away. With troops now on the streets, it’s frightening to contemplate where this will end. Everyday Australians are being deliberately demoralised to extract a higher degree of compliance. When COVID first arrived, there were few masks, and the experts and authorities told us masks were not necessary. Now, those same medically ineffective masks are used to condition people to fear and obedience. Crushing resistance crushes hope, and without hope we have no future.

Is it any wonder that small businesses are closing permanently? Every small business that closes is a family that was being provided for through hard work and enterprise. Who will look after those families now—the government? With whose money? The Reserve Bank, using electronic journal entries, can only create fiat money out of thin air for so long before it runs down our country. The government can only sell bonds until buyers stop coming forward. Then what happens? We will have no tax base left to pay government stipends to people who were once able to pay their own way. Since when has the Liberal Party, the supposed party of Menzies, been dedicated to making huge sections of the population totally reliant on the government for survival? The bad joke here is that the excuse used to justify the sudden rush to Marxism—public health—is moot. Death from all sources, including coronavirus and the flu, are at historic lows. Australia’s death rate in 2020 was less than in 2019, and 2021’s death rate is lower again.

We’re strangling Australia’s economic life and future for no reason. Power has gone to the heads of our elected leaders and unelected bureaucrats, who are exercising powers yet do not feel the consequences themselves.

Never in history has Lord Acton’s famous quote rung more true: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ It’s been calculated that the civil disobedience tipping point—which is the maximum capacity of the police to arrest people, of the jails to hold people and of the courts to process people—is in Australia around 100,000 people. Anything more than that and the system comes crashing down. Attendance at the freedom rallies last month shows we’re almost there.

No wonder the Morrison government has been scared into resorting to the refuge of tyrants—using the military to intimidate civilians into compliance and to mandating injections and threatening to rip away people’s livelihoods. Everyday Australians are seeing through the smokescreens of fear and intimidation. People now see that the costs of the restrictions to family and community exceed the medical cost of the virus. Everyday Australians have spoken. We will not be divided, we are united, we are one community, we are one nation.