While two-thirds of this country’s population is currently locked up at home and deprived of its fundamental freedoms, unelected bureaucrats in the federal Health Department operating under the cover of a health crisis, have decided to cancel women.  

In June, the department issued a guide for pregnant women and Covid-19 vaccines called ‘COVID-19 vaccination decision guide for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy.’ In the second and version issued in August, the title has been changed to ‘COVID-19 vaccination decision guide for people who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy.’ 

With one stroke of a pen, women have been ‘disappeared’ by public servants in the department of health who have gone through the entire document and made sure to take out nearly every reference to ‘women’ and replace them with non-specific ‘persons’ or ‘people.’ They have not only managed to ‘disappear’ women but also deprive them of the unique experience of motherhood in the name of political correctness.  

Make no mistake. This is not a meaningless exercise, but a deliberate attempt by ideologically driven, unelected public servants to impose their twisted version of reality, which says that women don’t exist, on the public. 

We have seen this before.  

Last year, Annaliese van Diemen, the then Victorian Deputy chief health officer, compared coronavirus to the arrival of Captain Cook on Twitter. “Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID19 or Cook 1770.’  Van Diemen used her position to make an historically inaccurate and overtly, ideological comment which was totally inappropriate. 

Again, in the middle of the pandemic, the Victorian Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions set out to hire a ‘Director, Inclusion and Intersectionality’ for which it was offering a generous salary of $192,800 – $249,700 plus super.’ In one single, job description, it explains the reason why the government was incapable of running a quarantine program or looking after the elderly. Instead of doing what it should have been doing, it was putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.  

In 2021, the federal government should be focused on the fact that small businesses are being decimated by the lockdowns across the country, not on cancelling women. 

Australia is a country in which the majority of the population does as it is told. Australians have assumed that the government has their best interests at heart and have enormous trust in the government. This makes sense because, by and large, Australia has been governed reasonably well.  

In the last 18 months however, we now have very good reasons to mistrust everything that the government tell us, because we have discovered that politicians have handed vast amounts of power over to unelected bureaucrats.   

These are the same people who are clearly making up the ‘rules’ as they go along. They are the same people who are shutting down playgrounds, forbidding us from talking to each other in the supermarket and prohibiting us from leaving our houses after 9.00 pm. 

We cannot have confidence in the advice being provided by state bureaucrats when it is clear that they are failing the Australian citizenry.  It has become apparent that they are not driven by concern for the public, but rather a desire to impose identity politics, radical gender theory and critical race theory on society, at the expense of everything else. We cannot and should not trust anything they say.  

Dr Bella d’Abrera is the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs.