The Tyranny of Health: Government, Law and Freedom in the Covid Era with Prof Nicholas Aroney

Eminent constitutional scholar Nicholas Aroney joins host Jonathan in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion of life in the era of covid. They discuss the Australian Constitution, federalism, the legislative power of State and Territory governments, the legal basis of lockdowns and associated measures, legal challenges to lockdown measures, vaccine passports and mandates, the power of health bureaucrats, the place of death in our culture, the modern tendency to over-legislate and the impact of covid on our personal freedoms.

Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Queensland. Professor Aroney has published over 100 journal articles, book chapters and books in the fields of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and legal theory. He has led several international research projects in comparative federalism, bicameralism, legal pluralism, and law & religion. He is the author of The Constitution of a Federal Commonwealth: The Making and Meaning of the Australian Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris II, Edinburgh, Durham, Sydney, Emory and Tilburg universities.

Host of The Political Animals, Dr Jonathan Cole, is an academic, writer, speaker and translator who specialises in political theology: the intersection of religion and politics. He is currently Assistant Director of the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University. Prior to that, he worked as a Senior Terrorism Analyst at Australian intelligence agency The Office of National Assessments. You can follow the show on Facebook and Twitter.