Win for Victorian Labor on pandemic powers

The Victorian government’s controversial pandemic legislation has passed the lower house amid sustained concern from legal figures that it lacks checks and balances.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Getty Images

The Victorian government’s controversial pandemic legislation has passed the lower house, 51 votes to 26, amid sustained concern from legal figures that it lacks checks and balances and would give the Premier unprecedented power.

While Labor holds 55 of 88 lower house seats, it is expected to gain the required support of at least three crossbenchers to pass the legislation in the upper house next month.

The Andrews government also passed an amendment on Thursday to ban unvaccinated people from serving on a jury.

Responding to criticism from Victorian Bar president Christopher Blanden, who said “Stasi police would have been more than happy with the range of powers” granted under the pandemic laws, Premier Daniel ­Andrews said the legislation was the “most transparent” of any produced by a state in Australia.

“Modelled on New Zealand, modelled on NSW, modelled on other Australian states, they are the most transparent, there is the best oversight,” he said.

Paul Hayes QC told The Australian it was “just flatly wrong” to claim Victoria’s legislation would offer more transparency than that of NSW or New Zealand.

Under the Victorian legislation, an “independent pandemic management advisory committee” is appointed by the health minister to review health orders and provide non-binding recommendations.

“You’d have to be naive in the extreme to think that the government isn’t going to appoint people to that committee who are not in some way sympathetic to their political leanings,” Mr Hayes said.

New Zealand and NSW have cross-party parliamentary advisory committees.

Mr Hayes also expressed concern regarding “dangerously broad and subjective criteria” governing the classes of person to whom a pandemic order may apply, which expressly excludes the application of the Equal ­Opportunity Act.

“The governments response to that concern seems to be to say ‘well, as if we would’ (discriminate against particular groups in ­society), but I think we’re entitled to maintain a healthy suspicion,” Mr Hayes said.

“In many other societies where laws have allowed power to be reposed by an individual or small group of people unchecked, leaving that power open to abuse, sometimes it is abused.”

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Tim Smith described the “ramming through” parliament of both the Juries Act amendment and the pandemic legislation as an “obscene abuse of parliamentary due process and accountability.”

Victoria reported 1923 locally acquired cases of coronavirus and 25 deaths of people with Covid on Thursday, representing the highest daily toll this year.

There were 746 people in Victorian hospitals with Covid on Wednesday, including 137 in intensive care, of whom 85 were on a ventilator.

According to the latest commonwealth figures, 77.82 per cent of Victorians aged 16 and over were fully vaccinated as of Tuesday, including 0.92 per cent who had their second dose that day.