Category: About me

With ref. to this, I’ve sent this:

I’ve written a section in this book The Great Covid Panic, just published by Gigi Foster et al. : https://www.thegreatcovidpanic.com/

I’ve skimmed through the book a couple of months ago – it is absolutely brilliant.

Here’s the text of the section I wrote for the book [screenshot from Kindle]

SANJEEV SABHLOK’S STORY

I came to Australia in December 2000. I had been a member of India’s permanent senior civil service since 1982 but had decided to leave in order to politically change India’s socialist model of governance. Since my initial attempt to form a liberal political party in India had not gone anywhere, I migrated to Australia in order to keep learning about good policy and good governance. In 2005, after three failed attempts to form an Indian liberal party, I took Australian citizenship. Since 2007, I have actively supported the political work of Anil Sharma, an Indian liberal from London, and helped him form India’s first liberal party in I remain a mentor and keen supporter of this party. My writings over the past two decades have thus focused mainly on bringing liberty to India. In these writings, I have often used Australia’s institutions as a role model.

It was a shock when I found that Australia’s institutions had suddenly and completely collapsed around me like ninepins in March 2020. My belief that Australia was a free nation was shattered. There was not the slightest fight back from any institution. The parliaments, the media, the courts — all went off the Enlightenment standard and hurtled headlong into the black hole of medieval irrationality. Everything I had learnt while working for nearly 20 years in Victorian government departments was breached. Risk-based approaches were tossed out in favour of untested coercive policies imported directly from the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. The requirement to analyse costs and benefits of pandemic policies was scrapped.

When Premier Daniel Andrews’ police started beating up young people for actions that were causing no one any harm, I commented adversely on the Police state on my social media channels. On 9 September 2020 I was asked by my bosses in the Department of Treasury and Finance to remove my social media comments. Within minutes of that meeting, I resigned my job as an economist and turned my attention to retrieving basic liberty in Australia.

When articles and a book (The Great Hysteria and the Broken State) that I thereafter wrote did not work, when the International Criminal Court is still twiddling its thumbs on a 68,000-word complaint that I lodged with it in November 2020, when the ASIO (Australia’s peak intelligence agency) has not responded to a 40-page Open Letter in which I asked it to investigate CCP’s role in the hysteria, I began to look for political, democratic alternatives.

Around Easter 2021, Peter Harris, the founder of the Family First party, identified the cause of Australia’s problems: the failure of representative democracy. Elected members of the big political parties had become spruikers of vested, global interests and did not care for the opinions of their constituents. This analysis resonated with me since Matthew Guy, my local member of Victorian Parliament from Bulleen, had blocked me on Twitter when I asked him to seek evidence in the Parliament for the CHO’s directive on mandatory masks outdoors.

Thousands of Australians have experienced similar unhappy incidents with their elected representatives, who virtually never bother to respond to their concerns.

Peter Harris and I have one political party each under our belt. We know how hard it is to form and run a party. But after a week of discussion and despite innumerable challenges that faced us, we

decided to proceed to create a new political party for Australia, to be called Australia’s Representatives. The party would embed into its DNA rules and processes to foster debate and make its elected members accountable to their constituents. A core ideology of liberty would underpin the party and a commitment to care for those who can’t look after themselves for reasons beyond their control.

At the time of writing this, I am preparing the party’s application for registration — a huge administrative chore with many pitfalls. If the party does manage to get registered in time for a possible November 2021 election, I will contest under its banner. If that doesn’t materialise, I’ll seek other options to contest elections — if for nothing else but to lay down in stone my firm opposition to the policies of the big parties.

The prospect of success of my battle against Australia’s totalitarian post-Covid regime is unclear. But my philosophy of life is simple.

There are times when we must fight for basic principles. This is one such time. We need to fight regardless of whether we are successful. The nishkam karma principle in the Bhagwad Gita (I’m not a religious person but agree with this principle) states that one must do the right thing without having any regard for the consequences.

In the bigger scheme of things, life is at its core a Mahabharata, a battlefield between good and evil. Today, evil has dramatically overrun and taken over almost all the institutions of the world. There is no longer an assurance that the good will ever come back from this comprehensive rout.

But the good can’t even imagine a comeback without being a perpetual contender in every battle. We need to channel the Churchill that exists within each of us: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”.