How crossbenchers respond to pandemic bill will be their political legacy

Victoria has been ruled by decree for nearly two years so the pandemic Bill’s only surprise is that more people aren’t in the streets opposing it.

The wholesale amendments to proposed pandemic laws can be measured in conflicting ways.

Sure, they soften some of the absurdly extreme measures put forward.

But they also show how dangerously misplaced the touted changes originally were.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out the obvious.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, the former deputy chief medical officer, has noted that resistance to pandemic laws is a uniquely Victorian phenomenon.

“You don’t see it anywhere else in Australia and you have to ask yourself why,’ he said on Monday.

“I mean we’re all Australians; why are Victorians taking the position that they feel the need to protest?

“I think that the government needs to have a long, hard look at itself as to why that might be.”

Premier Dan Andrews is unlikely to do any public soul-searching. Happily, plenty of others will offer to do so on his behalf.

Protesters gather on the steps of Victorian Parliament. Picture: Jason Edwards

The government has sought to tag protesters as nutters.

Yet the most convincing arguments to the government’s proposals are put by independent figures who shrug off extreme labels.

Victorian Bar president Christopher Blanden, QC, is not known for wilful and irresponsible pronouncements.

He encapsulated wider concern when he said the government’s pushing – others say rushing – of the laws through parliament “doesn’t add up to good democracy in my book”.

His takeaway? “It’s a disgrace.”

Pandemic controls are as much about what has happened as what may happen.

Victoria is sadly unusual. Out of step with everyone else. Longest lockdown. Petty controls which sapped morale and saved no one from Covid.

We have been ruled by decree since March last year. Isn’t the big surprise here that pushing to extend that style of law did not inspire even more ordinary people to the streets?

Why would you have to adjust planned laws to require the actual presence of disease in Victoria before being allowed to declare a pandemic?

It’s not just everyday citizens but legal minds against the new laws. Picture: Ian Currie

Why would two years in jail have to be curbed for aggravated breaches of pandemic laws?

Why would laws that discriminate according to political or religious beliefs be proposed in the first place?

Why wouldn’t the public health advice leading to restrictions be published at once, as opposed to within two weeks?

And why wouldn’t, as first proposed, people be allowed to appeal detention orders?

The clumsy overreach goes to the blanketed oppression that separates this state from all others.

Victorians on the whole complied with restrictions that did not abide by the science and its evidence.

We stopped doing so only when the controls came to feel worse than the threat.

Andrews has derided the Opposition commentary as “political games” which links dissent to anti-vaccination proponents.

Threats to politicians’ wellbeing are dreadful. Those who threaten personal safety should be prosecuted with vigour.

But the Opposition is right to claim that the wanton mishandling of these proposals will be an election issue.

After 2020 and 2021, after all the State-sponsored moments that jarred with decency, common sense, and a few hundred years of the democratic enshrinement of freedom and liberty, any hint of overreach needs to be smashed before its conception.

The three parliamentary crossbenchers who stand to tip the changes this way or that might be mindful that a traumatised electorate will prioritise the outcomes of this decision ahead of other policy areas.

How they respond this week will be their biggest political legacy.