Victoria: A fractured democracy

The fracking ban in Victoria’s Constitution sets an extraordinary and dangerous precedent that erodes parliamentary sovereignty and weakens democracy. By Nick Cater.

After successfully botching the management of a pandemic, the Andrews government has turned its attention to botching the recovery. Last week, the Victorian parliament not only banned ­hydraulic fracturing, but locked it into the state’s constitution, effectively depriving Victorians forever of a source of an abundant natural gas. Ludditism has been set in stone.

Fear and distrust of “natural Magick”, as science was once called, has a long history. The coming of the railways in the 19th century, for instance, sparked a popular belief that travelling at speed could trigger insanity, turning seemingly respectable gentlefolk into screaming maniacs. The superstition was encouraged by those opposed to progress, the people who paradoxically call themselves progressives today.

Their respect for science falls away when it doesn’t suit their ­argument. Victorian Resources Minister Jaclyn Symes told the Victorian parliament that coal seam gas presents “significant environmental challenges associated with waste water disposal, groundwater contamination, and ground subsidence”. Not according to the CSIRO, which commissioned an independent study into fracking in Queensland and concluded that the risks to air quality, soil and water quality could be ­effectively managed.

The CSIRO’s Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance reported last year that levels of most atmospheric air pollutants close to drilling sites were below relevant national air quality objectives, and that no fracking chemicals were detected in water samples taken from nearby groundwater bores, an adjacent creek or soil samples.

Symes was spruiking the kind of anti-science we deplore in those opposed to vaccination or chlorinated water. The Victorian government is fuelling popular fears when it should be assuaging them, just as with COVID-19.

Symes’ false claims didn’t stop there. She insisted that unconventional gas extraction would “put our food and fibre sector at risk”. In practice, coal seam gas extraction is relatively unobtrusive and can coexist with farming. Coal seam gas wells have a smaller footprint than the average wind farm and take up far less acreage than solar farms. The Gannawarra Solar Farm in northern Victoria, for example, sits on 182ha of prime land near Kerang and generates less than 0.5 per cent of the state’s electricity requirements during the day and nothing at night.

The cruel pretence that banning gas extraction helps agriculture is a double blow to farmers. They are denied the revenue that would come from a share in the royalties and denied a source of abundant gas that would make food and fibre processing cheaper.

Curiously, the Victorian opposition chose not to oppose the anti-fracking bill. As in other states, localised campaigns by anti-frackers in Coalition-held seats have sapped their courage. In any case, Victorian Liberal Party policy on fracking hardly matters, now that the 59th Victorian parliament has tied the hands of future assemblies. Daniel Andrews has set an extraordinary and dangerous precedent that erodes parliamentary sovereignty and weakens democracy. He has scrawled an addition to the constitution with the carelessness of a delinquent youth applying a marker pen to a toilet wall. It was left to a Liberal Democrat Legislative councillor to say what should have been said.

“It is astounding to me that the government, with a straight face, has presented this constitutional graffiti as some kind of significant and important reform,” David Limbrick told the Upper House. “It is posturing and legislative virtue signalling of the worst kind … Members of this government genuinely believe they should rule us from the political grave.”

The drafters of the Victorian constitution in 1855 could never have imagined it would be used to restrict anything other than the powers and procedures of parliament. The incorporation of ordinary legislation hasn’t been tested in court but perhaps it should be. Heaven forbid that a century from now the constitution should be weighed down by non-solutions to imagined problems.

The COVID-19 crisis appears to have emboldened the Premier to mould the institutions of liberal democracy to suit his will. The emergency provisions that have made him the most powerful premier in the history of the state have been extended until Christmas. Decision-making has been centralised, increasing the likelihood of mistakes.

The unreformed, union-dominated bureaucracy over which he presides has been incapable of delivering basic government services and is seemingly incapable of learning from the example of better-run states. The number of senior public servants in Victoria has more than doubled in four years from 691 in 2016 to 1471 in June last year. The most senior earn salaries of up to $457,000.

Andrews’ legacy of fiscal carelessness will dog Victoria for decades. The Premier’s Facebook advertising bill may be the least of the state’s worries, but a leader who spends $159,000 on this narcissistic platform and has the nerve to defend it in parliament as value for money should not be left alone with a pen and chequebook.

We might have hoped that the pandemic would have led to a sober assessment of Victoria’s energy policy. A more commercially minded government would have been keen to seize on the opportunities that would come from the expected return of manufacturing by enshrining cheap energy as a cornerstone of its policy. Yet with the passing of the Constitution Amendment (Fracking Ban) Bill last week, a document written to preserve the freedom of citizens now serves to constrain them.