Thread by @LizHcks

Excellent explainer and critique of Victoria’s new Pandemic Bill from Kristen Rundle, @WPartlett (@MelbLawSchool) & @mariaosulliv (@MonashLawSchool) earlier this evening.

Main concerns of speakers 🧵:
/1

https://twitter.com/WPartlett/status/1458214113893490692

- Sidelining of Parliament: new model has incredibly limited role for Parliament (Premier declares pandemic and Parliament not needed to renew). Disallowance mechanisms require both houses of Parliament, rendering them of limited practical use.
/2

- May make sense during the acute phase of a crisis, but pandemics last years. Need to be thinking of ways to involve P'ment in supervising gov's pandemic response as it morphs into a protracted political and societal problem, consistent with our tradition of responsible gov.
/3

- Limited role for courts / legal accountability mechanisms: because power conferred on the Minister / Premier, this ‘signals’ to courts to tread lightly in review. Means stronger case for strong parliamentary / pol accountability mechanisms, which are instead relatively weak.
/4

- Need for a specialised cross-party parliamentary committee that operates whenever a pandemic declaration is in effect (see position paper of the speakers in @cpi_aus)
/5

- Re independent committee to be appointed by Minister for Health: pandemic has highlighted extraordinary variation amongst health (and human rights) advice; degree of subjective value judgments involved. Effectively allows executive to select its preferred advisors / advice.
/6

- Ltd acknowledgement of the importance of the right of protest. No upper limit on detention powers — how do we know this will be used in a pandemic ten years from now? Only internal mechanisms for reviewing detention — better if could be reviewed by, eg, a magistrate.
/7

While the legislation may be an improvement on the status quo, it won’t require further action / review of Parliament (unlike status quo) so this is really the one chance to ‘get it right’.

“Better than what we have” isn’t really good enough.
/8

As we saw at the Fed level with the Biosecurity Act & border closures / India ban: we need to care about how these powers could be used five or ten years from now.

The time to care about Australians being banned from returning from India was back in 2015.

Care about this Bill.