Key flaws remain in the Andrews government’s amended bill

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews speaks to the media at Parliament House in Melbourne. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

The Andrews government’s last-minute amendments to its controversial pandemic legislation represent improvements to a deeply flawed bill, but as numerous legal and human rights experts have been quick to point out, they do not go nearly far enough.

The list of groups and experts who have made reasonable, apolitical criticisms of the bill is long, and includes Ombudsman Deborah Glass, the Victorian Bar, the Law Institute of Victoria, the Centre for Public Integrity, the Human Rights Law Centre, and more than 60 QCs including a former chief crown prosecutor and deputy IBAC commissioner.

Key among the remaining concerns of those including the Bar and Ombudsman are that the bill as amended entrusts responsibility for disallowing pandemic orders to the government-controlled Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee.

Anyone who has witnessed even a few minutes of the Labor-controlled Parliamentary Accounts and Estimates Committee’s hearings into the government’s management of the pandemic would regard as laughable the notion of such a group being independent and capable of holding a premier or health minister to account.

For such a committee to be granted sole responsibility for oversight of such extraordinary powers pays the merest lip service to calls for genuine checks and balances.

The other key concern of legal and human rights groups is that the bill allows people to be detained indefinitely without charge, with no right of appeal to a court.

Premier Daniel Andrews has sought to discredit those opposed to the bill by portraying them as anti-vaxxers and extremists.

Sadly, he has been aided and abetted in this deflection by protesters who have rightly been widely condemned for deeming it appropriate to use nooses and gallows as props in recent days.

The idiotic behaviour of a small minority aside, the reality is that the most credible and genuine arguments against the bill have been dispassionately expressed by some of the state’s best legal minds.

As Paul Hayes QC told this paper last week, there should be bipartisan concern about the bill, given the power it grants not just to this government, but to those which will succeed it.

“Think of the politician you least like or trust, and imagine them holding such unchecked power. If a week is a long time in politics, imagine who could be holding that power in a year, four, five years’ time,” Hayes said.

The make-up of Victoria’s current parliament sees the power to pass controversial legislation disproportionately held by the three upper house crossbenchers most likely to vote with the government, namely Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick, Reason Party MP Fiona Patten and Greens Leader Samantha Ratnam.

While that privilege has undoubtedly come with immense pressure, and vile abuse directed towards them, their staff and their families in recent weeks must be denounced, it must also be observed that should the three crossbenchers allow the amended legislation as it stands to pass, they will be granting unchecked power not just to this government, but to all those who govern Victoria for as long as the bill remains law.