Peta Credlin: Premiers must stop laying the blame on ‘expert advisers’
The Queensland and Victorian premiers have made captain’s calls during the coronavirus pandemic, but when they go awry they will not take responsibility, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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When it comes to dealing with this pandemic, have you noticed how often our leaders have told us that they’re acting on “expert advice”? Over and over, that’s been the mantra from Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
He had no choice but to impose a curfew, to lock down a city, and to subject 5½ million Melburnians to a virtual police state because, he claimed, that’s what the experts said was necessary.
Only they didn’t.
Last week we learned that neither the Chief Health Officer nor the Victoria Police Commissioner had recommended the curfew.
In the case of the police chief, he wasn’t even consulted.
It turns out that the curfew was just a massive captain’s call from a premier who’s sailing this ship of state into the rocks.
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Then there was the appalling spectacle of the Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declaring that decisions on whether a young Brisbane woman, returning from COVID-free Canberra, could attend her father’s funeral weren’t hers to make.
Come on. It is a weak and cowardly leader who hides behind bureaucrats — but if you were in any doubt about Palaszczuk’s character, accusing the Prime Minister of bullying for making a private phone call pleading for compassion for young Sarah says it all.
A premier doesn’t get to play the gender victim card when she’s forcing a grieving daughter to view her father’s body, in full PPE, escorted by police, banning her from even a hug from her Mum or little sister. Then escorted back into lockup in her quarantine hotel. All on RU OK? Day.
We all know who’s the real bully here. It used to be that the unelected bureaucrats provided the “frank and fearless” advice and that it was the elected politician who made the decisions. But more and more, this fundamental principle in our democracy is being inverted with legislation devolving power to public servants.
As well as bolshie upper houses, and different levels of government running interference, one of the key explanations for governmental paralysis is that so much decision-making has been subcontracted out to supposedly impartial officials and supposedly expert bodies that the public has no sway over.
Often enough, this is just a mask for politicians who enjoy being in office but would prefer to shirk tough decisions. Usually, it is justified as “taking out the politics” but the end result is a massive democratic deficit and growing public frustration at a system that is out of control, and where no one is prepared to take responsibility.
Take last week’s shambles over koala protection laws in NSW.
This took the form of a State Environmental Planning Policy directive that came out of the bureaucracy, was given a quick once-over by distracted politicians who were assured there was “nothing to see here”, was promulgated by simple enactment rather than debated in the parliament and examined by committee, and — once in actual practice — produced a government-shaking meltdown.
Only an overzealous Sydney-centric bureaucrat could decree that imported camphor laurels were part of the koala feeding cycle, or that the Newcastle lighthouse was part of koala habitat.
But this is what happens when decision making is handed over to so-called experts.
Earlier this year, in the People’s Republic of Victoria, when the parliament still sat, it passed a Gender Equality Act mandating the creation of a Gender Equality Commissioner, complete with a 40-page gender equality strategy, requiring some 300 government bodies to produce gender diversity reports that the commissioner will then police, even though there’s already an Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, with at least seven senior staff.
A politically-correct, identity-obsessed, activist public service is, of course, exactly what Dan Andrews wants.
Thanks to the pandemic, there’s more scrutiny on our state governments, and that’s a good thing.
It’s been absent for too long and that’s been a big part of the decline in their ability to govern well. If there’s one lesson I hope we all take out of this COVID crisis it’s that who you vote for in a state election matters more than you might have realised.
CHINESE ‘TIT-FOR-TAT’ EXPULSION ONLY ADDS TO PROBLEMS
The effective expulsion from China of our last two accredited Australian journalists could have been tit-for-tat after Chinese “journalists” here had their visas withdrawn because they were essentially spying on the local Chinese community.
A better indicator of the regime’s nature is the indefinite detention of Australian citizen Cheng Lei, who for years has anchored the government’s own English-language broadcaster.
Her “crime” was to be mildly critical of the government in a couple of Facebook posts.
She’s now in solitary, with all evidence of her employment wiped from CGTN websites.
There’s a clear lesson here: any person or country critical of the communist government can expect punishment.
After what seemed like a generation of slow liberalisation, China’s government is reverting to type: a cross between Maoist hysteria and “Middle Kingdom” exceptionalism where all are expected to “tremble and obey”.
Most of our trade is probably safe for now because there is no readily available substitute for Australian iron ore.
But the Chinese-student-funded salad days for our universities are over, and we can expect far fewer Chinese tourists too.
The real tragedy is for the Chinese people, who’ve shown in Hong Kong and Taiwan that they’re as keen as everyone else to be free.
With China now embarked on the world’s biggest and fastest military build-up, we will have to urgently do what’s necessary too.
As if there weren’t enough problems already.
THUMBS UP: John Fahey. Vale to the former NSW premier and later Howard government minister — one of the true gentlemen of politics who had a ready smile for staff in the corridors as easily as he shook the hands of the powerful. A man who had seen life’s good times and its tragedies, and a man of exceptional compassion.
THUMBS OUT: The Oscars – New rules that make diversity quotas mandatory for a film to be nominated. Goodbye to films like the harrowing ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and the Churchill epic ‘Darkest Hour’. What’s next? We strip out our galleries too? No concerts of white men music (sorry Beethoven, Mozart and more) and opera?