Impurities and inconsistencies abounded in ACT politics during the week.
The ACT is now the only jurisdiction in the world that supports shooting galleries and heroin on prescription, but makes it a criminal offence to put a flyer under a windscreen.
And the same man, Michael Moore, is the sponsor of both.
Also, we had the legislature performing the executive function of determining spending priorities by ordering that Downer Pre-School stay open.
On that one, we had Moore, hitherto Mr Education, voting with the Government for closure. It did not even require the presence of Kate Carnell to persuade him to stay in the fold. But in her absence the Osbornes played up and voted against the Government to keep the pre-school open.
The Assembly’s action, and the Government’s response to it, was completely flawed, whatever the case is for the pre-school to stay open. The Assembly should legislate, not govern. It should pass laws which might, for example, require ALL pre-schools to have safety equipment, or for the minister to take into account certain things when determining when ANY pre-school is to be closed. It should not make the decision that pre-school X should stay open at the cost of X million dollars. That is the executive function.
The Government bowed to the Assembly. It means the Assembly can now pick and chose spending priorities without taking overall budgetary responsibility. The Government should have rejected the Assembly’s motion, causing a no-confidence motion if necessary.
This result will only encourage the Assembly to force the Government’s hand on other matters. The Government shooed have nipped the tactic in the bud. It can now only be a matter of time before the Assembly adopts a motion that the Government finds it cannot accept and it will be sufficient catalyst to absolve the Osbornes and Green from their promises to support stable government. A no-confidence motion would then see a change of government, probably sometime next year. If it happens, the rot would have begun with the Downer pre-school decision.
A smarter Government would have seen what was coming and somehow avoided it. But Carnell is in China.
On the flyers, Wayne Berry got it right. “”What’s next?” he said. “”Chewing gum on the pavement, untied shoelaces or haircuts.”
It was an oblique reference to the illiberal Lee Kwan-Yew’s Singapore.
Hitherto, the ACT has been a bastion of small-l liberalism.
ACT Labor, in the absence of heavy industry and any industrial-relations head of power, has not succumbed to the totalitarian excesses of the industrial arm of the Labor movement which conscripts conscience into block union action via the non-secret ballot. In its place, the looney left espoused some way-out policies, but a lot of them were about individual liberty.
And the ACT Liberal Party has been spared the excesses of the Victorian and Western Australian purges that replaced every small-Liberal with social troglodytes, largely because the electoral success of Kate Carnell has kept the social troglodytes subdued.
But now we have the inconsistency of support for a heroin trial and voluntary euthanasia pitted against Nanny State making criminals of people putting flyers on windscreens.
Surely if you object to the state and the criminal law having an over-bearing role in drug control, you should not want the criminal law to intrude into other areas of harmless activity.
Freedom of speech and advertising should override minor inconvenience to motorists.