Continuous Vigilance is the Price of Freedom
Philo spends most of its time, in fact almost every waking hour in Brett’s case, thinking about how to develop better managed account services. But occasionally we wake up to the world around us and look in horror at some of the things we see although they aren’t directly in our area of operations.
Last week there were two instances, that while unrelated to each other, raise serious questions for us about government – political and bureaucracy - whose interests are they there to serve and what are their core values?
Australia is currently, rightly, responding negatively as China moves to stamp out freedom of speech, and a free media in Hong Kong or a reasonable reliance on the rule of law. From now on “rule of law” is whatever the CCP secret police say it is. In Australia, we oppose this authoritarian security law because it is anti democratic and alien to the values which we believe should apply in a just society.
Those values include, among other things:
A free press
Property rights - the right to enjoy those things which are yours
Dealings by government should be undertaken with integrity – a government’s word is its bond
Last week we saw two state governments introduce bills to their state parliaments, successfully in the case of West Australia, happily withdrawn in the case of Queensland which abrogate these principles.
You may think that Clive Palmer is Australia’s own Trump – hard to disagree if you do think that – but he’s a citizen like any other and he entered into a contract in 2012 with the then WA Government. That contract has been the subject of litigation and arbitration which have found in favour of Clive Palmer and Mineralogy. The next step was an arbitration hearing on damages. That’s pretty far down a legal path which so far the WA Government appears to have lost. Remember, this has been going on since 2014.
Last week, the WA Government passed a law through both houses, developed in extreme secrecy, and introduced after 5pm, to deny Palmer and Minerology a large number of rights to which they would otherwise have been entitled. The law terminates the dispute, deprives Palmer of rights under his agreement with the WA Government, any rights of appeal, any rights under the Freedom of Information Act and protects “any conduct of the state” and rules out any entitlement to “rules of natural justice…[or]..procedural fairness”. Secretary Xi, there are lessons for you here.
Meantime several time zones and a continent’s width away, the Queensland Attorney- General Yvette D’ath thinks it’s a good thing – remember that an election is looming – to introduce a law which would ban the reporting of complaints to the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission within 6 months of an election. Among the reasons for its introduction was that it would prevent the election being “highjacked by the publication of baseless allegations” Presumably the good people of Queensland are too stupid to try to understand for themselves what is important to them in determining who to vote for.
Happily, unlike the WA bill which was introduced, passed and signed into law within 6 hours, the Queensland government withdrew its bill in the face of opposition from many quarters.
So what do these two laws tell us?
There appears to be a combination of political and bureaucratic incompetence which allowed the WA / Palmer situation to arise in the first place and in the way it may have been handled subsequently.
Does this mean they can just legislate their way out of a problem?
And in the case of Queensland, we can only wonder at the political / bureaucratic combination which actually got as far as drafting, approving and introducing such a piece of legislation.
We hear a lot about the democratic values that underpin Australia and the Anglosphere. But if they are under attack from within by unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians afraid of losing power, then those values can’t last long.