Patrick Carlyon: Victorians don’t need Dan as political father figure
We are emerging from lockdown, apparently never to return. So why is Dan Andrews seeking to rush through laws which would give him unprecedented power?
Patrick Carlyon
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Premier Dan Andrews doesn’t want to be mistaken for a “soppy Dad” to Victorians, he said last week.
He might want to avoid father figure allusions, given planned legislation to bestow a single person – Dan Andrews, as it happens – the concentrated power to lock us in our homes, ban public gatherings and close businesses.
Under the proposed changes, the premier of the day could declare a pandemic in continuing three-month blocks. The chief health officer would lose the power to issue health orders, instead deferring to the health minister.
The laws would replace the flawed state-of-emergency orders, the latest of which will soon run out.
Yet the timing is peculiar. We are emerging from lockdown, apparently never to return.
Why rush laws which fundamentally tip our most basic rights, even though we supposedly do not need them any time soon?
If some Victorians felt comforted by protections that topped the world for extremes, others bristled with a loss of freedoms they likened to unaccountable guesswork.
The point here is centralised power built on the personality of Andrews.
He is ruthless, as all political leaders are off-camera, but also a leader who routinely sidelines his ministers.
Andrews has presided in an era which redefined the assumption of freedom in this state. Victoria surrendered more liberties through lockdown than any other city or province, democratic or otherwise.
We are raw because of it. Nervous, too, that a government could apply health advice – which it did not disclose in detail – to summarily snuff out everyday liberties.
To seek now to streamline that power is insulting to all Victorians who suffered through petty restrictions shown to contribute nothing to the pandemic fight.
Andrews softened his approach, certainly.
But before he did, his hectoring adherence to curfews and playground bans, as well as his zeal for other cruel and sometimes unenforceable laws, created criminals out of ordinarily law-abiding citizens.
Opposition Leader Matthew Guy called the plans the “most dangerous legislation to come before an Australian parliament”.
Crossbenchers have received a panache of built-in safeguards for their political support. Under the plans, an independent committee would examine government pandemic decisions.
Herein lies the next problem.
Recent history tells us that independent oversight doesn’t always get a result in Victoria. A legal inquiry into the hotel quarantine bungling could identify no one who enacted a choice that condemned 768 Victorians.
Advocates speak of greater scrutiny of decision-making processes, almost as if unaware that this very government, like most governments, has avoided scrutiny with an airy disregard for truth and transparency.
We don’t want a political father figure. History is littered with them, and almost all of them are remembered unkindly.
Instead, we need an enshrined system of checks and balances which protects us from any repeat of the blanketed stridency which harmed us all.
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