Emergency Powers must end!

MUST WATCH: QCCL PRESIDENT TELLS GOVERNMENT: ‘THESE EMERGENCY POWERS MUST END!’

QCCL President, Michael Cope, made a bracing stand for ‘common sense’ at last week’s Committee hearing on the Government’s Public Health and Other Legislation (Extension of Expiring Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022.

The new bill seeks to extend a number of the Chief Health Officer’s extraordinary powers for another year.

As Mr Cope points out, by the time the new Sunset date rolls round, Queenslanders will have been living under emergency laws for 4 years, which is simply not acceptable in a “free society”.

The new Bill is being sold as a more ‘streamlined’, ‘step-down’ approach to exiting the current state of emergency in Queensland.

Queensland’s Civil Liberties’ Council chief, however, was having none of it.

Mr Cope pointed out that with the availability of ‘safe and effective’ vaccines and anti-virals there was no longer ANY reason for these emergency powers to be retained past their current expiry date of 31 October 2022.

According to QCCL, the emergency situation used to justify the granting of these extraordinary powers of the CHO in the first place, no longer exists.

In a written submission on the Bill, the Council said it was concerned this “long-term intervention into the lives of Queenslanders to micromanage them”, was becoming a “norm changing arrangement”.

In a news blog earlier this year, QCCL referenced the raft of anti-terrorism laws Australian parliaments had passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Most of those laws had also contained sunset clauses and these had all been extended again and again, with the most recent extension passed by the Commonwealth Parliament on 24 August 2021.

So 20 years on, not only are these anti-terrorism laws still in place, they are now being routinely extended without scrutiny or debate.

As QCCL notes:

“It is because of examples like this that the Council is not prepared to accept the assurances of the government that the current emergency will come to an end when the powers are no longer necessary”.

I couldn’t agree more!

WATCH THE QLD GOVERNMENT TOLD “THESE POWERS MUST END, BEFORE THEY BECOME PERMANENT!!”

(Note the visuals on it start after a minute or two)