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When it became clear that the Andrews government would need to win over more than three friendly crossbenchers to ensure the passage of its pandemic management bill, Transport Matters Party MP Rod Barton warned that the government had “taken six months to stuff this up, so they have got to give us a week and a bit”.

With Mr Barton having won six significant amendments to the proposed legislation and the bill now more than likely to pass into law, that week and a bit seems to have been time well spent. But as Premier Daniel Andrews asks us to focus on the outcome, it’s worth pondering the extremely messy process by which we arrived there.

“There’s always back and forth and there’s always good faith negotiation and this is no different,” Mr Andrews contended, to which Mr Barton and Clifford Hayes of the Sustainable Australia Party might reply that there was no negotiation with them at all, good faith or otherwise, until the bill hit a reef.

Democracy is indeed all about dealmaking – the bill itself came out of a deal on extending emergency powers – and sometimes involves messy compromises. But when the major impetus for the government to revisit its proposals comes from a sudden intervention by rogue MP Adem Somyurek, questions must be asked about the Premier’s approach.

Before this unscheduled extra negotiation, the bill still included powers of detention overseen by the health minister and chief health officer and a category of aggravated offences punishable by fines of almost $50,000 and two years’ imprisonment. These provisions were challenged even by those who otherwise believed legislation was necessary, such as Ombudsman Deborah Glass and Greens MP Tim Read, and attracted the ire of the protesters who now regularly fill our streets.

Mr Barton’s vote has secured independent review of the detention powers, and the aggravated offences have been removed. This is to be welcomed. But the fact these provisions were there in the first place points to a problem of arrogance and overreach in the government’s attitude to the citizenry. That problem was also in evidence in the lack of oversight for the powers the government sought, and here there may still be questions over what has been achieved, as Mr Barton conceded.

The creation of a cross-parliamentary committee to review pandemic orders, as well as the amendment allowing a joint sitting of MPs to block health directions, is still very much subject to the government’s majority in Parliament. As a group of legal scholars have written in a piece for The Age, the effectiveness of these amendments depends on the government’s willingness to resource such a committee and avoid stacking it with loyal MPs. They also point out that appointments to the two-year review of this legislation – another amendment sought by Mr Barton – will need to be robustly independent and the review itself transparent.

As we have pointed out before this year, serious doubts still hang over this government’s willingness to meet basic standards of transparency, whether it be putting its decisions on spending or transport planning before Parliament, properly resourcing watchdogs or ensuring the advice it receives comes from non-partisan sources. In the early days of the pandemic, governments across the nation were overwhelmingly given the benefit of the doubt as they exercised quite extraordinary powers over our lives. But as the protests on the steps of Parliament House in Spring Street have shown, taking such assent for granted can erode trust both inside and outside the building.

Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes, who led the negotiations with crossbenchers, said yesterday that the unexpected detour this bill has taken had “sharpened people’s minds”. We hope it has also served as an unmistakable road sign to this long-incumbent government that it needs to take a far more inclusive and transparent route to all its policy destinations in future.

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