I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with him, but Augusto Zimmermann believes we have virtually become a police state. Zimmermann is not a weirdo or a nutter; he is a PhD, lawyer and academic at several WA tertiary institutions. He thinks that the Chinese virus has brought about this 'police state' without "much complaint or dissatisfaction" from the population; possibly because of "our … ignorance of our own legal traditions …. ".

Zimmermann believes that the erosion of fundamental rights is "both deep and widespread in this country". We are being patronised and spoken down to, so that citizens now have a distorted view of what the government can do for them. They have acquired an unshakable faith in their political class as that class, led by Scott Morrison and state premiers have developed a taste for the arbitrary exercise of power, which Zimmermann expects them to continue with after the China virus crisis is over.

While the PM tells us that he is just doing what medical advisors advise, it is a poor leader who hides behind "experts" whose only expertise is medical; and the current crisis is not just medical. The experts have no knowledge of the "holistic" situation: sociology, economics and constitutional law are all relevant if we don't want to end up broke and downtrodden; all for a projected mortality rate of 0.9%.

(Source: 'In the State You Will Trust', Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, DipEd, Quadrant Online 15/4/20)

Once the appeasement money runs out I think more and more people will start to agree with Zimmerman. To many freedoms have been given up with no rational basis. Everyone agrees something had to be done but putting so much power in the hands of so few will result in many freedoms not being returned and compulsory vaccination/monitoring for the average person. I suspect this is a trial run and the 'elite' are loving it. Denying people saying goodbye to loved ones is barbaric no matter how much it is promoted as 'compassionate' and for 'good cause'.

It's no more a China Virus than it is a US Funded Virus.

http://vermontbiz.com/news/2020/february/13/leahy-coronavirus-and-trumps-budget

"Pandemic response is critical, but often by then it is too late. We can and must do more to proactively reduce pandemic risk. One approach I have urged is for a global viral discovery effort. Such a concept was proven successful through USAID’s PREDICT program, which used the collection and analysis of wildlife samples in areas of the world most at risk for zoonotic disease to identify new emerging viruses with pandemic potential. PREDICT was able to discover hundreds of disease pathogens at their source, rather than waiting for human infection.

In China, the PREDICT program sampled more than 10,000 bats and identified more than 500 new coronaviruses, including a strain that is a 96 percent match to the 2019 novel coronavirus strain. The known existence of, and readily available data on, such a close relative is one reason China was able to quickly sequence the novel strain and identify the animal source of the outbreak."

Now read this one:

Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus

http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698

"In the current study, we successfully cultured an additional novel SARSr-CoV Rs4874 from a single fecal sample using an optimized protocol and Vero E6 cells [17]. Its S protein shared 99.9% aa sequence identity with that of previously isolated WIV16 and it was identical to WIV16 in RBD. Using the reverse genetics technique we previously developed for WIV1 [23], we constructed a group of infectious bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones with the backbone of WIV1 and variants of S genes from 8 different bat SARSr-CoVs. Only the infectious clones for Rs4231 and Rs7327 led to cytopathic effects in Vero E6 cells after transfection (S7 Fig). The other six strains with deletions in the RBD region, Rf4075, Rs4081, Rs4085, Rs4235, As6526 and Rp3 (S1 Fig) failed to be rescued, as no cytopathic effects was observed and viral replication cannot be detected by immunofluorescence assay in Vero E6 cells (S7 Fig). In contrast, when Vero E6 cells were respectively infected with the two successfully rescued chimeric SARSr-CoVs, WIV1-Rs4231S and WIV1-Rs7327S, and the newly isolated Rs4874, efficient virus replication was detected in all infections (Fig 7). To assess whether the three novel SARSr-CoVs can use human ACE2 as a cellular entry receptor, we conducted virus infectivity studies using HeLa cells with or without the expression of human ACE2. All viruses replicated efficiently in the human ACE2-expressing cells. The results were further confirmed by quantification of viral RNA using real-time RT-PCR (Fig 8)."

Which part don't you understand?
The US funded a study that paid the Chinese to go out and collect bat samples, which has over 96% match to the current virus, and part of that study was to transfect to intermediates and see if it would also transmit to humans.

Which part of that don't you get?

Blaming the wet markets is total utter BS.

runner,

I think that you are probably right. All our so-called elites are going to come out of this looking pretty shabby.

What I don't understand, AC, is your ongoing defence of China, the biggest threat to Australia and the world. The virus is definitely the Chinese virus. Do you have Chinese connections? Are you Chinese yourself? But that's not the point. Do you agree with Zimmermann's claim of do you not? Are we in danger of becoming a police state?