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Freedom activist Monica Smit wins case against Australian gov’t but still must pay $240k

Published

9 months ago

13 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

I accused the police of unlawfully arresting me those three times. I was offered $15,000 to walk away. I said no because I wanted my day in court. I wanted to use my story to highlight the injustices that many Victorians experienced during 2020-2022.

Recently I represented myself against a team of government lawyers during a 13-day trial over 7 weeks and won! That’s great news, isn’t it? But there is a twist that has become far more important to this story than the victory itself. It will have you asking, “What is the price of justice?”

Imagine you’ve been wronged by a government body.

Imagine your liberty was taken from you without just cause.

Imagine that no one was willing to take accountability or admit any fault.

Imagine you were offered a measly $15,000 with no private or public vindication.

If you take the money, you have permission to keep asserting that you think you were wronged, but you will never get closure. It will always be your word against theirs.

Who benefits if you take the deal?

Well, the government benefits because they are using taxpayers’ money to pay you off and they will avoid public embarrassment or taking accountability. You benefit a little because you win a bit of money and avoid the stress that comes with a long trial.

You get to skip away into the sunset with your ‘hush money’/bribe, and nothing changes for anyone else. The government continues to feel emboldened by their limitless power and gets further confirmation that they are invincible. The ‘little people’ like you and me stay in our box and accept that we are powerless against authority, even when we’re victims.

Who benefits if you don’t take the deal?

The court makes money regardless of what the trial is.

The team of lawyers bill out their hours as usual. They get paid regardless of the outcome. The longer the trial. the better.
You might benefit because you get to air your grievances publicly and have a chance at vindication and closure.

Even better. if you set a precedent, it could benefit every single person in the country, The government might be forced to be accountable and implement new policies and procedures to ensure other don’t lose their liberty without just cause.

These are your options; take the money, avoid inevitable stress and at least a few people benefit…including the perpetrators, or say no to ‘hush money’, pursue justice, have your voice heard, and hope that more people benefit in the end, despite the risks.

But wait. There’s a catch to the second option: if you choose the full trial and win, you might have to pay the cost of the government’s legal fees. If the judge gives you the public vindication you seek but awards you less money than the government offered to shut you up, then technically you lose because the outcome would have been ‘better’ had you taken the deal.

My name is Monica Smit, and this is my story.

On October 31,  2020, I was arrested three times in one day while working as an independent journalist at a protest in Victoria, Australia. Victoria has since been correctly labelled the ‘worst locked down state in the world.’ I was on the ground at a protest reporting on a significant period in our history. I had a big following and was openly critical of the current government’s restrictions around the so-called pandemic.

I accused the police of unlawfully arresting me those three times. I was offered $15,000 to walk away. I said no because I wanted my ‘day in court’. I wanted to use my story to highlight the injustices that many Victorians experienced during 2020-2022. And despite the risks, I went all the way. I represented myself in a 13-day trial that spanned over 7 weeks.

The government’s team consisted of two barristers and two solicitors in the court room working full-time every day of the trial. On the other side I was standing on my own, sometimes with a McKenzie friend beside me, and with supporters in the audience.

Appearing at that trial was the most stressful thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. The emotional and mental energy needed to pull this off far exceeded my expectations. On top of that, I had to pay around $1,500/day to the courts every day for the use of the room and resources.

Despite all the difficulties, I did my best, and I am pleased with my efforts. I convinced the court that two out of the three arrests were unlawful. What a victory!

Or at least that’s what I thought until the judge awarded me only $4,000 in damages.

Again, I had been offered $15,000 to avoid court. I then won the case by two-thirds. But instead of celebrating my win, I had to spend the night preparing to fight tooth and nail to avoid paying for the government’s legal costs. How is this fair?

To restate this, on Thursday, September 12, I won my case against the government. Two out of the three arrests were found to be unlawful. On Friday, September 13, I was ordered to pay over $240,000 to cover the costs of the government’s loss to an inexperienced self-represented citizen.

I represented myself and won against an experienced team of barristers and lawyers. I got the public vindication I was seeking—but then I was punished for the pleasure of daring to seek justice.

I don’t view success in monetary terms. For me, it was always about using my voice to speak for those without a voice. Thousands of Victorians were abused during the COVID lockdowns, and they and don’t have the resources to pursue justice for themselves. The offer of $15,000 did not have justice attached to it in any form whatsoever. It was the proposed exploitation of taxpayers’ money to make me shut up and go away.

I would never do that, and I don’t care what the consequences are. The ‘safe option’ is never the right option for me.

What is the price of justice? I guess you could say that in this case, the price of justice was $240,000. But how can justice be available to everyone if it cost that much? The answer is simple. Justice is not available to everyone. In fact, it’s available to almost no-one at all.

Every single person at the bench and bar tables in that courtroom got paid every single day, except for me!

I paid to be there, I paid to have my voice heard, I paid to represent myself, I paid to win, and I paid for justice.

To be frank, I never thought this could happen. How naïve I was that I thought I could seek justice and walk away unscathed.

But who was I kidding? Ever since I  first opened my mouth and created a platform over 4 years ago, I have been punished over and over, and there is no end in sight.

Luckily for me, I can handle this. I was born a little crazy, and I possess the right amount of crazy to deal with these intense mental hardships. I have a supportive network of family and friends. I have complete faith in God, and I just go with the flow. It’s how I am, and I thank God every day for giving me the strength to keep laughing punishment in the face.

A year after this first incident, I was punished again by being arrested and charged with incitement. I was given bail conditions that could have been written in Communist China. They wanted me to shut down my business which had 6-7 staff members and hundreds of thousands of members. My website got over 5 million views that year, and they wanted me to shut it down.

I refused to sign those draconian bail conditions and was sent to maximum security prison, even put in solitary confinement, to await the appeal of the conditions. I won the appeal and was let free. I pleaded “not guilty,” and soon after they dropped the charges. I will be suing them for my imprisonment despite the difficulties I faced in this recent trial.

The ‘system’ needed to do this to me to discourage other people from pursuing public vindication. I refused to take a deal outside of court, and so they needed to make an example out of me. They need others to fall in line, to think that if they don’t, they’ll be punished just like Monica Smit.  I think that they want to scare me from pursuing my next court case.

Well, it won’t work.

I am skilled at finding silver linings.  My experience will highlight the injustice within the justice system. How can someone win their case but pay over $240.000 for the pleasure of winning? It’s so shocking that it will inevitable get noticed. I have complete peace that I did my best and had pure intentions. I put the rest in God’s hands.

Thank you everyone for your support and prayers along the way.

Monica’s note:I will not be conducting a fundraiser for this. I am confident God will look after me and I will be able to figure this out. But you can my audiobook for only $10 (Australian)  here.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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