The totalitarian regimes responsible for the most heinous atrocities of the Twentieth Century – Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot – didn’t get there overnight. They used fear to control, excluded the “dirty” people (softly at first), justified the exclusion, moved to harder exclusions, and eventually eliminated people either socially, or physically. In Twenty-First Century Australia, State Premiers are racing down that familiar path, trying to out-tyrant each other, drunk on power, setting up their own bio-security police states complete with medical apartheid.
