The former prime minister’s defence of secretly backing up the health and finance ministers doesn’t pass muster. And ghosting Treasury, Home Affairs and Resources was just plain abuse.
, authors Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers recount the scenario in which there was logic in sharing the health powers.The Biosecurity Act, a beast of the Coalition’s own creation, gave then-health minister Greg Hunt enormous and unprecedented powers akin to the imposition of martial law, and which no parliament could overturn.So it was agreed to establish protocols to provide checks and balances on the use of the powers.
While a case could be made for the back-ups in health and even finance, there was no excuse for keeping either of them secret from the public.“There was a great risk that in the midst of that crisis those powers could be misinterpreted and misunderstood, which would have caused unnecessary angst in the middle of a pandemic and could have impacted on the day-to-day functioning of the government,” he said.
The government was about to hand down a budget, JobKeeper had been wound up, and an early election at the end of the year remained a possibility, despite the vaccine snafu. Either way, there was much less prospect of a minister being felled.
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