, 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.
Presumptuous headline!
Yup, it is like saying 'I want to stop a single point of failure from pandemic by creating another single point of failure'. Such strategy wont cut it for any BCP (Business Continuity Plan), let alone a proper one.
The civil servants behind this should be fired ASAP too
Knew this would be fanboy Coorey when I saw the headline. His legacy is a narcissistic egotistical autocrat. Coorey was so far up him and now shocked at reality.