The state’s emergency powers are implemented by a flourish of the wrist of the Health Minister.
Brad Hazzard, the Health Minister, sought to have those powers extended for a further 17 months. That proposal was green lit by the Coalition cabinet earlier this week but after what was reported in The Australian as a “bitter party room meeting,” Premier Dominic Perrottet has given himself some homework to do over the Christmas break before returning with a remodelled form of legislation.
The term “legislation” would seem to raise the likelihood of debate and a successful vote in both houses before becoming law, but this is not immediately clear.
To date, the health orders have been presented to parliament as “delegated legislation,” but they are not debated and not voted on. Parliament essentially has become a rubber stamp for imposing lockdowns, border closures, the establishment of red zones, mandatory vaccination across a range of industry sectors and the imposition of limits on public gatherings as well as in people’s homes.
These facts have been roughly ignored by the media and to a lesser extent by the anti-vaccination movement. The focus for good or ill, is the Victorian legislation which with only a few minor distinctions, appears strikingly similar to those urged by Minister Hazzard.
Will the Perrottet government return to work next year to find amateur hangmen present on Macquarie Street, with death threats thick in the air and on the internet? Time will tell.
There have been ugly scenes in Melbourne as protesters paraded a make-shift gallows targetted at Daniel Andrews, while also threatening to storm the state Parliament. #9Todaypic.twitter.com/9OQxEjDwvT
— The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) November 16, 2021
State governments have had to do the bulk of the heavy political lifting in the pandemic. There has been overreach, no doubt. The term “abundance of caution” became a cliche and finally a pejorative for timidity.
Political capital has largely gone unspent. WA Premier, Mark McGowan sits on a glistening treasure of it after his near annihilation of the WA Liberal Party in the state election in March. He has been arguably the most apprehensive of all the state premiers. He now argues that WA must reach 90 per cent fully vaccinated before he’ll open up the state borders.
The Andrews government with its long, tortuous lockdowns has faced the biggest backlash with a protest movement that grows in size beyond the lunatic fringe. It seems to enjoy the confrontation, implementing a wide range of vaccine mandates and creating a chest thumping bill shamelessly imposing state control for long periods with draconian penalties (the penalties are the main point of difference between its bill and Hazzard’s health orders) for nay-sayers and miscreants.
Meanwhile, the Palaszczuk government seems fixated on zero Covid outcomes, a well established fantasy.
With an eye on an election sometime after Christmas, the Morrison government has basically departed the field. But when the Morrison government had its chance to play the heavy hand of state, it confidently took the gloves off and hit on measures that threatened citizens with jail terms should they commit the abhorrent crime of returning to Australia.
Scott Morrison is tut-tutting government overreach now, having suddenly come over all libertarian. If you believe that, I’ve got an EV pulling a caravan and a boat to sell you. The conversion, perhaps not of the Road to Damascus type but the road to wherever you feel like you want to go, is a nod and a wink to voters.
Are our political leaders genuinely timid, frightened of even small scale Covid-19 outbreaks? Are they scared of returning Australians kicking off the fourth or fifth waves of Covid-19 infection? Are they fearful that health systems and hospitals will collapse under the weight of an outbreak? Or now that Australia is on the cusp of global rarefied air in terms of vaccination rate, have they simply become addicted to the use of essentially unfettered power?
The answer probably is, a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
Government overindulgence has the so-called freedom movement in its druthers. I like to think of them as people who think freedom means having the right to jump the queue at Centrelink. They are an eclectic cocktail of anti-vaxxers, cultists who have a uniquely Australian take on Q-Anon, anti-lockdowners and libertarian rubber-neckers as well as a few politicians seeking clout and bounce.
The pollies who opportunistically want to cosy up to these groups need to understand what they’re dealing with. They seem impervious to it. Never get in the way of a politician looking for a vote, I guess.
Perhaps those politicians need to spend some time in the internet’s shadows to get a better understanding. Last night I flipped through the usual corners of Telegram, the encrypted, largely anonymous chat room where these people play out their fantasies in gruesome messages. Death threats are commonplace. Talk of mass executions is the new chic. One moron posted what he thought was the address and phone number of Dan Andrews’s mum. It almost certainly wasn’t, not that it would have stopped the calls being made to the unfortunate owner of the cited telephone number.
The extreme right, neo-Nazis, ultra-nationalists are never far away. Scratch the surface of these posts for long enough and sooner or later anti-Semitism rears its ugly head. One commenter said the Victorian governor, jurist and barrister, Linda Dessau was “a Jew and not to be trusted.” These people and these views have no place in mainstream political debate.
For the most part, it’s ugly, self-serving hallucinations but I’ll wager those who make these appalling remarks online are not the ones we should be worried about. It is those who sit sullenly, silently scrolling through these awful delusions and outright lies, getting angrier and angrier as they go that pose real threats to our communities.
Our political leaders have made plenty of mistakes in what is broadly described as pandemic management. The vast majority of Australians have done the right thing. They have accepted that desperate times called for desperate measures. They have rolled their sleeves up and got vaccinated in truly impressive numbers. Now it is time for governments to withdraw, to take a pass on planning for bleak outcomes, to get out of the way.
Without government excess, no lockdowns, no overreach and, borders open again, much of the freedom movement will dissipate. It shouldn’t be cast as a backdown. It is simply time for government to stop giving monsters a voice and for the monsters to scuttle back to the shadows where they belong.
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In NSW there is no contentious bill before the parliament and no crowds milling outside with working models of gallows. The Perrottet government and the Berejiklian one before it has relied on the Public Health Act (2010) and to a lesser degree the State Emergency and Rescue Management Act (1989) in the creation of the state’s emergency powers.