A Diminished Democracy?
Liberal Member for Western Region Victoria, Bev McArthur MP, used the one-day emergency sitting of the State Parliament on Thursday to express her growing unease about Premier Daniel Andrews and his increasingly cavalier attitude to the democratic process and the public scrutiny which it protects.
In her speech on the COVID-19 (Emergency Measures) Bill, brought forward by the Government to legalise a range of emergency powers, she noted that she had been largely supportive of measures to protect public health in recent weeks, but felt growing disquiet at the continued sidelining of Parliament, and indeed scrutiny of any kind.
She called for the Premier to work to resume sittings of Parliament, noting “Supermarkets and construction sites continue to operate, and yet scrutiny of government is curtailed, at a time in our history where I can say with no fear of hyperbole that it has never been more needed…”
Mrs McArthur highlighted her concern that after a single-day session to pass Emergency legislation, the State Parliament will not now sit again until June, and condemned as deeply inadequate the Andrews’ Government’s alternative mechanism of Parliamentary scrutiny, the ultimately Government controlled Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC).
She said: “While some of us would always prefer to see Government in the background, we do accept that in times of public crisis like this, it has a greater role. But while we can accept that the role may be greater, the form that Government takes should not be allowed to change.”
“The so-called ‘gang of eight’, the Premier’s mates, [are] a smaller number of people wielding power just when that power has grown exponentially. Where is the challenge, where is the diversity of views, where is the alternative authority that can check the growth of a uniform mindset, the onset of groupthink, and the antipathy to opposition, which breeds the kind of decisions that lead dictatorships to disaster?”
She went on to add: “It is deeply concerning that when Parliament cannot meet, when even the Cabinet is sidelined, the Premier has refused to establish an oversight committee with a non-government majority to scrutinise his increased powers. This is happening in other jurisdictions around the world, it is happening in Canberra and New Zealand, and it should happen in Victoria. It is the bare minimum which we should accept.”
Highlighting slow decisions by Ministers on tenancy support, local government regulation, the resumption of elective surgery, and the deferral of the Landfill tax levy, she made a passionate case for the effectiveness of Parliament, concluding, “I felt it my democratic duty to express my reservations surrounding some of its provisions, the way it has been drawn up, and the uneasy feeling I now have that our democracy is uncertain and diminished just when we need it most.”
24 April 2020