The state of democracy in Australia and, more prominently, the state of Victoria at the moment is horrific. Citizens of Australia, a supposedly free and democratic nation, have been denied many of their fundamental democratic and human rights, and civil liberties. The rights to protest and free assembly (O'Connor, D. 1976) have been stripped from the people and citizens enacting such rights like those in Melbourne recently are fired upon by police using "less than lethal" rubber projectiles and tear gas, which according to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, is banned for use by militaries in warfare and is considered a chemical weapon (Brown, J. L., Lyons, C. E., Et al., 2021).

Another gross overreach of government power and authority is the vaccine mandates which effectively amount to a form of coercion or medical apartheid in which citizens are threatened with loss of their livelihoods and ability to be a functioning member of society. These mandates effectively enable both private and government institutions and businesses alike to be complicit in an act that violates both the law with regards to discrimination and the infringement upon the fundamental human right to informed medical consent, which quite clearly violates the Geneva convention (Leaning J. 1999), the Nuremberg code (Shuster, E. 1997), The UN declaration of human rights (Assembly, U. G. 1948), as well as Australia's laws regarding "freely given and informed medical consent to treatment or experimentation," (Skene, L., & Smallwood, R. 2002). Such a violation will ultimately lead to acts of gross discrimination.

No elected official has within their capacity, the authority to conduct policy in such a manner that is counter to human rights agreements and laws established for the safety, health and wellbeing of individuals and society as a whole.

It is with these observations understood, that we, citizens of Australia demand that the coercive and inhumane process of threatening Australians to relinquish their rights to bodily autonomy and informed medical consent, under duress of losing the ability to work or participate in many facets of society and normal life, be ceased immediately! It is also requested that all parties involved in the conception and implementation of such egregious misconduct are investigated for potential misconduct and are cooperative in such investigations.

References

Assembly, U. G. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. UN General Assembly, 302(2), 14-25.

Brown, J. L., Lyons, C. E., Toddes, C., Monko, T., & Tyshynsky, R. (2021). Reevaluating tear gas toxicity and safety. Inhalation toxicology, 1-16.

Leaning J. (1999). Medicine and international humanitarian law. Law provides norms that must guide doctors in war and peace. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 319(7207), 393–394. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7207.393

O'Connor, D. (1976). Citizen's rights in Australia. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 30(3), 503-510.

Shuster, E. (1997). Fifty years later: the significance of the Nuremberg Code. New England Journal of Medicine, 337(20), 1436-1440.

Skene, L., & Smallwood, R. (2002). Informed consent: lessons from Australia. Bmj, 324(7328), 39-41.