Peta Credlin: Dan Andrews has gone too far with new state of emergency laws

Victoria’s new state of emergency laws will make Premier Daniel Andrews the nearest thing to a dictator that Australia has ever seen, Peta Credlin writes.

The trouble with power is that it’s addictive. Nearly two years of Covid rule in Victoria has only heightened Premier Daniel Andrews’ lust for control, giving plenty of modern-day weight to the centuries-old adage that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

But even Andrews seems to have gone a step too far with new state of emergency laws introduced into the Victorian parliament last week and rammed through the lower house in a matter of hours.

This time, the pushback has gone beyond a few hundred pariah protesters, readily dispersed by police using rubber bullets and tear gas.

Instead, these draft laws have mobilised the state’s legal fraternity against the government, many media players, too, and finally given the opposition an issue to fight on.

Under the new laws, set to replace the existing state of emergency when it expires in mid-December, virtually all powers are vested in the Premier and his health minister while removing bureaucratic controls (not necessarily a bad thing) but also the parliament and cabinet, too (a betrayal of our Westminster system of government).

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

The proposed laws will enable any new pandemic declaration to be extended indefinitely, and the penalties for breaching health orders (such as masks) are up to two years in jail with $90,000 fines.

The president of the Victorian Bar, representing the state’s barristers, has declared that this “draconian” Bill authorises “virtually unlimited interference with liberties” and is the “greatest challenge to the rule of law … in decades”.

The Bill “confers effectively unlimited power on the health minister to rule the state by decree for an indefinite period and without effective judicial or parliamentary oversight”.

As well, 23 QCs have signed a letter declaring that entrenching emergency powers “as a long-term norm” is “antithetical to basic democratic principles” and the government should not be given a “blank cheque to rule by decree”.

So far Dan Andrews has been a political Houdini. He’s emerged unscathed from the red shirts scandal, when taxpayer money was misused for political purposes, the Lawyer X scandal, when police secured conviction after conviction on tainted evidence, the judicial persecution of the innocent Cardinal Pell, the serial incompetence of hotel quarantine failures for which no one took responsibility yet which killed 800 people, the ALP branch-stacking affair now being investigated by the corruption watchdog, and now this blatant attempt to seize absolute power “for our own good”.

These laws, if upper house crossbenchers Fiona Patten, Samantha Ratnam and Andy Meddick land a grubby deal and cave in, will make Daniel Andrews the nearest thing to a dictator that Australia has ever seen.

The question is, what does that make the Victorian people if they continue to submit?

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm