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Let’s protect what makes us great
This year, allow me to offer up a controversial opinion. Despite much commentary to the contrary around Australia Day, this is a great country, writes Dr Matthew Bach MP.
Dr Matthew Bach MP
Like all countries, our history is fraught. Injustices committed against indigenous Australians continue to present huge policy challenges to this day.
Nonetheless, despite our significant challenges, unlike the vast majority of other countries Australia is a tolerant, diverse democracy. More than anything, that’s because of the rule of law.
When the famous historian Niall Ferguson listed the most important elements of Western liberal democracy he stressed the rule of law; key tenets of which include separation of the judiciary and the executive government, the presumption of innocence and jury trials.
I strongly disagree with some of Ferguson’s views. In short, he fails to fully recognise the harms of empire. Yet he is right about the immense positive benefit, to all of a country’s citizens, of the rule of law.
Under the rule of law, justice should apply equally to the powerful and the powerless. Thus, it protects the vulnerable. And that’s a damn fine thing.
But the rule of law is under attack, both inside Australia and beyond our shores. Internally it’s under attack from those who wrongly believe that Australian society is defined by “isms” and “phobias”: racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, to name but a few.
We’re not perfect. But this just isn’t true.
So-called progressive paradigms like critical race, social control and moral panic theory dominate legal debates. For example, many Australian academics continue to argue that Western legal systems are rigged against the poor, the weak and the powerless.
Using such frameworks they contend that a ruling elite including the media, judges, politicians and police (in short, all the organs of the state) intentionally seeks to hold down the poor and the marginalised. Yet such notions do not bare scrutiny.
Let’s take the period of the pandemic here in Victoria as a case in point.
Time and time again powerful elements of Victorian society spoke out.
Remember when 60 eminent QCs and the Bar Association condemned the Victorian Government's pandemic lockdown laws?
Or when the head of the Police Association spoke out powerfully against the use of Victoria Police to enforce the playground ban?
Or when the Ombudsman herself criticised the Government over its hard lock-down of public housing towers which - according to her - violated human rights?
I could go on. This wasn’t a ruling class working together to support the government of the day. If anything, this was a ruling class in revolt, seeking to protect children, the poor and the powerless.
But theorists of the afore-mentioned schools dominate many university humanities departments, where the majority of politicians were educated (including Daniel Andrews, and me!).
So, is it any wonder so many of our politicians are openly hostile to the rule of law? Is it any wonder so many supported the Victorian Government's lockdown laws, which – according to those 60 QCs – trample on cherished legal norms?
We take the rule of law for granted at our peril – as we are so lucky to have it. It wasn’t that long ago that freedom, democracy and the rule of law appeared to be in the ascendency around the world.
I was fortunate enough to be living in Maggie Thatcher’s Britain, as a child, when the Berlin Wall came down. There was such hope and optimism.
Communism in Eastern Europe was in its last days and serious academics wrote about the “end of history” – meaning the final victory of liberal democracy and the rule of law.
But fast forward to today and those predictions look particularly foolish.
Authoritarianism, not democracy, is on the rise around the globe. There are great challenges, both in our region and farther afield, notably in eastern Ukraine. Many, if not all, relate to the rule of law being debased.
So, here in Australia and Victoria, we must cherish the rule of law. And when we see it attacked - and therefore our fellow citizens made vulnerable - we should use our power at the ballot box to defend it.
Our ability to do so is something else that makes our country so great.
Dr Matthew Bach MP is the shadow attorney-general of Victoria.
