Border police to have extra powers

Mr McGowan now wants to see police at WA’s border be given the ability to search any vehicles entering the state for drugs

Ten days out from the election, West Australian Premier Mark McGowan defended his plans to hand additional search powers to the state’s police, despite having previously described similar measures as “quasi-fascist”.

Mr McGowan on Wednesday continued to back down from his plans to extend some of the state’s border restrictions beyond the pandemic, ruling out any continuation of WA’s visa-like G2G pass system.

But he now wants to see police at WA’s border be given the ability to search any vehicles entering the state for drugs by making permanent some of the additional powers given to police during the pandemic.

Meth use in WA has fallen by about 25 per cent, with the border restrictions cited as a major factor in reducing the availability of supply.

“We do not support the importation of meth into Western Australia,” Mr McGowan said on Wednesday. “Having a presence that deters it has had a remarkable outcome in reducing meth usage in our state.”

Mr McGowan was a staunch opponent of the so-called “stop and search” laws proposed by the previous Liberal government, having described the legislation as “abhorrent” when in opposition in 2009.

“I think it is quasi-fascist legislation, and that it is more in tune with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is the sort of thing that one might read about in William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” he said at the time.

Mr McGowan dismissed the comparison as a “totally false equivalence”, arguing that the stop and search bill — which was ultimately defeated — gave far broader powers to police than those now being proposed by his Labor government.

“It’s a massive difference … it was totally over the top,” he said. “What we are talking about here is on the border, where we ­currently have a checkpoint for bananas (and) we should be able to check for meth.”

The Premier’s Tuesday comments about a potential extension of the G2G system have been a gift for WA Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup, who said the plan was an “absolute overreach” and an example of why the government should not be given “total control” of the WA parliament at the election.

Labor is firm favourite to retain power at the March 13 poll.