Continuous Vigilance is the Price of Freedom

Philo spends most of its time 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, even though they aren’t directly in our area of operations.

Last week there were two instances, unrelated to each other, that 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. We oppose this because it is anti-democratic and alien to the values which should apply in a just society, including a free press, property rights, and government dealings undertaken with integrity.

Last week we saw two state governments introduce bills to their state parliaments – successfully in the case of Western Australia, happily withdrawn in the case of Queensland – which abrogate these principles. Clive Palmer entered into a contract in 2012 with the then WA Government, which has been the subject of litigation and arbitration that found in favour of Palmer and Mineralogy. Last week, the WA Government passed a law through both houses, developed in extreme secrecy and introduced after 5pm, to deny Palmer and Mineralogy a large number of rights, terminating the dispute and depriving Palmer of rights of appeal, rights under the Freedom of Information Act, and any entitlement to natural justice or procedural fairness.

Meantime, Queensland’s Attorney-General introduced a bill (later withdrawn in the face of opposition) that would have banned the reporting of complaints to the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission within 6 months of an election.

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 case of Queensland, we can only wonder at the political/bureaucratic combination which got as far as drafting, approving and introducing such 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.