Piers Akerman: WA Premier Mark McGowan does not respect democracy

Cancel culture now appears to apply to our democratic rights in some Labor states, writes Piers Akerman.

Increasingly, Australia is becoming unrecognisable as the liberal democracy it has been for more than a century.

Under the cover of Covid and the current Delta variant, so named so as not to offend Indians from the subcontinent where it was first identified, politicians have ceded their authority to unelected public servants and embarked on a breathtaking attempt to neutralise the democratic principles on which the nation was founded and the Constitution the people voted for to provide it with a legal framework.

The most naked attempt to strip Australians of their rights was the denial by Western Australia’s State Labor government to ban a Christian organisation from hiring public facilities because its views didn’t align with its own.

Forget that governments come and go, the reality is that public facilities are just that – for the public – no matter what their beliefs may be, so long as they the organisations are not illegal or proposing to use their meetings to break the law.

It should also not be forgotten the public has paid for those facilities through taxes, not the WA Labor Party or any other political organisation.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan. Picture: Getty

Premier Mark McGowan, like his Queensland counterpart, Annastacia Palaszczuk, is an authoritarian first and foremost, with little or no regard for the people he rules.

In denying the Australian Christian Lobby from booking the Perth Concert Hall and the Albany Entertainment Centre under new guidelines which permitted the Perth Theatre Trust to refuse bookings from individuals or organisations “where the content of the event does not represent the views of the WA government or the vast majority of Western Australians”, McGowan has taken the cancel culture to a level only the Chinese Communist Party would applaud.

The McGowan government, never backward in licking Beijing’s boots, may well have appropriated its policy from the Chinese playbook.

Last year, the state-run Perth Theatre Trust apologised to the Chinese government for permitting the Taiwanese Acrobatic Group to perform at the State Theatre Centre.

It is doubtful that the McGowan government was pressured by anyone from the Chinese Embassy to offer the embarrassing apology, though embassy officials have notoriously threatened Chinese students who have pointed out the democracy deficit that exists on the mainland.

On Friday, it would seem that the WA government may have backed down and granted the ACL a provisional permit to hold a meeting at a hall in regional Geraldton, a concession after threats from the ACL to bring a suit against the government under the Equal Opportunity Act, which makes it unlawful for a person to not make facilities available to another person on the grounds of their religious or political convictions.

While the updated WA policy expressly rules out leasing venues to “political parties for the purposes of electioneering and fundraising”, venues managed by the Perth Theatre Trust and fellow government body VenuesWest were hired out to WA Labor Party candidates and the party in the lead-up to the March election.

When WA Labor is the arbiter, clearly it holds the power to decide that its candidates are apolitical when it comes to its hiring policy.

Albany Mayor Dennis Wellington is but one of many outraged by the McGowan’s government’s arrogant approach to public property.

“The ACL are not illegal, they have a right to their opinion, and I cannot see a reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to use the damn thing. We’ve asked for an explanation from the theatre trust,” he told the media.  

“Quite frankly I think it’s discrimination, flat out.

“Prior to the last election, the venue was hired to the Labor Party for a fundraiser for (WA politician) Peter Watson’s farewell,” Wellington said.

He also expressed concerns for the financial loss the city will incur.

“They’re ratepayers’ funds. You unilaterally can’t make the decision to say you pay for it when it’s not your money. I don’t know what planet they’re on but it’s not the same one as me at the moment,” he said.

It’s no secret that WA’s economy is reliant on sales of iron ore to China or that the trade has made a handful of West Australians super-rich or that the opposition in WA is non-existent.

Nothing gives the McGowan government the power to cancel democracy.