Dear Editor,

On Friday February 18, my family and I returned to the Northern Territory via the Stuart Highway through the South Australia-Northern Territory border. On arrival at the border, all control measures had been removed with the exception of a vehicle registration data camera trailer so the government could still capture the registration numbers of vehicles entering the NT.

I later discovered the NT Government had removed all restriction on persons, or category of persons, entering the NT. Simply put, it no longer mattered what your vaccination status was.

Further, the media release which was issued by the government late that day (near 4:30pm), and which appears on the NT Government’s COVID-19 internet page advises the following: “With high vaccination rates in the Territory, and across the country, it has become an unnecessary use of resources to require all travellers to complete a border entry form to enter the Territory“.

Further, as reported in that bastion of unbiased news, ‘your ABC’, the NT Government quietly lifted the ban preventing un-vaccinated people form entering the NT.

The chief health officer directive denying un-vaccinated persons from entering the Territory was revoked on that Friday without any explicit announcement from the NT Government.

Given the above, why has the NT Government not revoked the ‘emergency declaration’, if there are now high rates of vaccination, not only in the NT, but throughout Australia?

Let us look at the specific wording used in the Public and Environmental Health Act 2011 which the NT Government is using to enforce its draconian controls of the public: face masks, employment vaccination conditions, etc.

Section 48 of the Act specifies the following grounds to substantiate an emergency declaration upon which all CHO directives are based:

The Minister may, in writing, declare a public health emergency if the minister is satisfied that circumstances of such seriousness and urgency exist that are, or threaten to cause, an immediate serious public health risk.

And, after consulting the chairperson, as defined in section 8 of the Emergency Management Act 2013 (EMA), of the Territory Emergency Management Council, a state of disaster or state of emergency has not been declared under the EMA because of the circumstances, and It is not appropriate to declare a state of disaster or state of emergency under that Act.

So, if we look at the specific wording of section 48, the circumstances which must be found to make an emergency declaration are: serious and urgent grounds that threaten to cause an immediate serious public health risk, and a state of disaster or emergency has not been declared.

Given the above wording of section 48, this means that there must be serious and urgent grounds to make and extend any emergency declaration. Without which, any declaration must be immediately revoked by the health minister.

The government media release indicates is that there are high vaccination rates across the country, and it is therefore no longer a risk to maintain the border controls.

In other words, the serious and urgent grounds that threaten to cause an immediate serious public health risk are no longer valid, especially when considering the low numbers of people actually seriously affected.

Even by the NT Government’s own data today there are 101 in hospital with seven of those in the intensive care unit.

The Territory population is approximately 250,000 people. This makes the percentage of people in the NT seriously affected by COVID-19 to be 0.000404 per cent. If I only took it to three decimal places it would have been zero.

Certainly not in the serious and urgent range one would think.

Therefore, using the government’s own words in reopening the borders, the emergency declaration should be revoked immediately with all CHO directives also immediately becoming null and void.

I would also like to point out at this time that the CHO directions are not law as is often bandied about by those who do not know the difference between an apple and an orange.

Put simply, the CHO directions are only in place for the duration of an emergency declaration, and should immediately be revoked once the extreme measures are no longer required. This was why the declarations were originally only five-day orders in the PEHA, however were extended by the NT legislature around October last year to make them 90-day orders.

Further, there has been long-held protections within our legal system and common law against the independent and arbitrary rule or power of government (or of an individual person within government), of which the CHO’s declarations fall. This would therefore make many of the critical CHO directives illegal, specifically those contained within directive 55 which has seen so much harm forced upon the community of the Northern Territory.

I therefore call upon Chief Minister Michael Gunner, Health Minister Natasha Fyles, or Dr Hugh Heggie, to immediately revoke the emergency declaration or provide the public with the extraordinary grounds you are reliant upon to substantiate the declaration.

Your grounds to continue are no longer valid and my belief is that there were never any valid grounds in the first place.

Leith Phillips

Ex-NT Police Sergeant, Alice Springs

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