Victorian crossbench MPs will demand parliamentary oversight of state of emergency powers as a condition of granting the Andrews government an extension to laws under which binding health directives are issued.
Crossbench MP Fiona Patten, the leader of the Reason party, told Guardian Australia she had had a “very constructive conversation” with the health minister, Jenny Mikakos, on Tuesday. She said she was “encouraged” that the minister was open to discussing concerns about the proposed extension of state of emergency powers, which would potentially allow the Andrews government to renew the state of emergency for another year.
On Wednesday the state recorded 149 new coronavirus cases and a further 24 deaths, of which 21 were connected to aged care.
Patten said Mikakos had indicated the government would consider proposals for a select committee to oversee decisions taken during a state of emergency if an extension was approved for three or six months.
She said it was a more nuanced outcome than the “sledgehammer approach” put forward by the government, and would make it easier for the state of emergency to be extended past 2021 if needed. “This is an ongoing solution that means we won’t be back in the same position again in six or 12 months as per the government’s proposal,” Patten said.
The Victorian Greens are still considering the bill. Another crossbench MP, Andy Meddick from the Animal Justice Party, said he was still talking to stakeholders but was leaning toward supporting the government.
Meddick told Guardian Australia if the state of emergency was not extended Victoria would have “no powers to respond to the pandemic”. Meddick said given Victoria was the only state or territory to impose a limit on the number of times its state of emergency or equivalent could be extended, having to come back to parliament in 12 months’ time was still “significant oversight”.
The premier, Daniel Andrews, told reporters on Wednesday he was still seeking the full 12-month extension, but said there had been “very productive discussions with the crossbench”.
The state of emergency powers expire on 13 September.
The state of emergency can be enacted for four weeks at a time, and renewed for up to six months. It has been renewed six times since first being declared under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act on 16 March.
A 12-month extension would mean the state government could potentially keep renewing every four weeks until September 2021. It’s the legal mechanism under which public health orders such as the stay-at-home orders, mass gathering rules, self-isolation for positive cases, and compulsory face masks are enforced.
The proposed extension would not apply to the more serious state of disaster, under which the 8pm curfew and 5km radius are enforced.
The proposed 12-month extension has been criticised as an unnecessary overreach by legal advocates, who say it would then rely on the government to exercise restraint over its use of extraordinary powers. Andrews said restrictions would not be needlessly extended, telling reporters that once daily case numbers dropped further he would use “the lightest touch possible – only what’s necessary and only for so long as it is necessary”.
He said if the state of emergency were not extended past 13 September, when the stage four restrictions are due to expire, case numbers would rocket back up.
“You simply can’t have an opening-up strategy unless you have the ability to make those sorts of rules,” Andrews told reporters. “The key to opening up is not going from stage four to stage zero, where there are no rules.”
Andrews said it was “too early” to say what would happen when the stage four restrictions expired, or even to give a “definitive date” on when the Melbourne area would return to stage three. Regional areas are already under stage three restrictions.
“If we haven’t got the legal authority to be able to say to someone who’s positive, ‘righto, you have to stay at home for 14 days’, but we ignore that fact, we open up, businesses start to employ again, people start to moving around the community again, [then] we get the inevitable extra cases, we get the outbreaks,” he said.
“That will lead to rather than businesses recovering, workers getting back to work, families having that sense of financial security, we will just be essentially, I think, beginning a third wave.”
