‘Dictator Dan’ for Life – And After

You can blame it on the glaring lack of anything resembling an opposition party in the state, or you can blame it on a population who’ve lurched so far left that it’s a wonder they haven’t triggered earthquakes in Bordertown. Either way, Victorian voters will find themselves “standing with Dan” for a very, very long time.

Apparently attempting to emulate his paymaster in Beijing, “Dictator Dan” has moved to make sure that his miserable ghost lives on in Victorian politics as a kind of constitutional premier-for-life-and-beyond.

This goes beyond Andrews’s attempts to extend his dictatorial COVID “emergency powers” well into next year. The Victorian premier’s latest ideological folly is imposing a ban on fracking that will be written into, not just legislation, but the very constitution of Victoria. At the last election, Daniel Andrews vowed to “ban fracking for good”.

What he meant by that was that his government was willing to go further than simply passing laws to ban fracking. It would entrench this policy in the Victorian constitution[…]In doing so, the Parliament has effectively bound future democratically elected governments to this policy. Jamming it in the constitution means any future state government will require a three-fifths majority of both houses to amend it.

The extraordinary danger of this move has little to do with the merits or otherwise of the particular policy. It cuts right to the heart of what it means to be a democracy.

Enshrining this ban in the constitution will essentially allow the Andrews government to govern from the grave.

Constitutions are meant to be rigid documents which protect the most basic machinery of government. Importantly, a constitution should remain free of party politics.

The dangerous template for this move was set by the previous Bracks Labor government, which entrenched public ownership of water authorities in the Victorian constitution.

So any future democratically elected government in Victoria will remain bound to election policies of long-gone Labor governments.

This is an extraordinary and astonishingly anti-democratic practise. Even the Bjelke-Petersen government – regularly decried as “fascist” by the left – never felt the need to ensure that its miserable ghost would govern from the grave. Like a lobster pot, this is a very easy situation to get into, in Victoria, where the change can be enabled by legislation but only removed with great difficulty.

Unfortunately, now that it’s in the constitution, only a court can decide whether or not that is the case. A costly exercise that Victorians should not have to pay for.

Equally, if this constitutional change is ineffective then it is, as Liberal Democrats MP David Limbrick described yesterday, simply “virtue signalling of the worst kind”.

In the absence of any meaningful opposition from the Coalition, Limbrick and his upper house colleague Tim Quilty were among just a handful of politicians to defend our democratic rights.

Limbrick pointed out that this debate is not an environmental one.

“The principle here goes far beyond any discussion of the pros and cons of hydraulic fracking. What is of concern here is a precedent where the government of the day can enshrine in the constitution any policy at all,” he told the Legislative Council.

“Will our constitution in 200 years be littered with snippets of archaic policy, no longer relevant to the situation of the day.”
“Will future citizens of Victoria be denied full access to democracy?”

The Age

Hang on, Dan has to check back with Xi Jinping before he answers that one.

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