Bill to create police state has no place in this nation

As the pandemic curve continues to flatten in Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews’s descent into dictatorial hubris deepens. A group of eminent retired jurists and senior counsel have expressed their alarm at the draconian measures contained in Mr Andrews’s draft COVID-19 Omnibus legislation. It effectively would transform Victoria into a police state, with all the odious trappings that entails. The human-rights zealots who proliferate in the law faculties of Victorian universities are curiously silent. Their obsession with retrospectively changing birth certificates for a tiny minority or ensuring the gender fluid may play female sport seems to have exhausted their sense of justice. They are strangely silent when it comes to the transformation of their state into a pallid version of East Germany. There, informers and collaborators assisted the authorities in tracing and incarcerating their fellow citizens without warrants, on the basis of prospective conduct — just as this bill envisages for Victoria.

On any measure, Mr Andrews’s latest foray into the suppression of his citizenry under the guise of suppressing a virus is repugnant. As well as violating long-cherished legal principles, it is un-Australian. It seeks to enlist the population as informers and arms of the state in rounding up others who are guilty of no offence. It would set a diabolically dangerous precedent and would be wide open to abuse. Even Mr Andrews’s most ardent supporters must repudiate this legislative overreach. So must the gaggle of single-issue crossbench dupes who rubber-stamped his diktat imposing the most severe lockdown in any democratic polity on earth. The bill raises significant questions. Whose idea was it? Who has been advising the Premier? Why does Mr Andrews deem it necessary to turn citizen against citizen? Where and for how long would citizens be held? Could they appeal to a court? How often would citizens, including pregnant women, be taken from their homes, in front of their children, and detained indefinitely?

A line has been reached. It must not be crossed. If the Legislative Council does not throw out this odious legislation, then the Morrison government should review the role of Australian Defence Force personnel in Victoria to ensure they are not used as police. The explicit denunciation of this legislation by former High Court justice Michael McHugh QC is significant. He was a moderate, punctilious member of the court who never fully embraced the implication of human rights and freedoms into the Constitution. He is the epitome of a black-letter lawyer rather than a judicial activist. Yet Mr McHugh is justifiably alarmed at the tenor and text of this bill.

It is beyond dispute that fundamental common law principles such as the presumption of innocence and recourse to the writ of habeas corpus were received into the Australian colonies and later into the federal Constitution and domestic common law. While rejecting a formal bill of rights akin to that in the US constitution, our founders were acutely aware that recourse to the great writ of habeas corpus and principles of legality were integral to Australian law. This abomination tramples on the letter and spirit of those principles. Until now, they have not been seriously questioned, even during the existential crisis of World War II. At no time has this pandemic constituted a threat akin to either world war.

Now, as Victoria makes belated headway against a catastrophe that arose through cronyism and incompetence at the heart of the Andrews government, the time has come to ease restrictions rather than enact tyrannical laws. There has been too much hyperbole about this Premier from his supporters and detractors. But this legislation adds credence to the appellation “Dictator Dan”. To his blind army of fans on Twitter, Mr Andrews is beyond reproach. He is above the routine scrutiny required of every member of a democratically elected parliament. Journalists who legitimately seek information about his incompetent, opaque and increasingly authoritarian government are showered with vile abuse by the compassion police, whose virtues are ostentatiously displayed along with their preferred pronouns and consequence-free demands to free refugees. Indefinite detention, apparently, does not arouse their tender consciences. For decades, Melbourne’s culture has been deeply enriched by those who fled in search of freedom from the iron grip of various police states. Tear up this bill, Mr Andrews. It has no place in Australia.