Steve Bracks is wrong. He claims his secret deal with the police union is no different to the dozens of other promises he made before the last state election.
There are two reasons why the Premier's confidential agreement with the police union was not your typical, everyday campaign promise. First it was secret. Second it was with the police union. Committing taxpayers to pay the legal fees of police officers convicted of corruption is not the same thing as undertaking to build a new road.
There's been no explanation from the Premier as to why the deal was secret. If Labor believed its promises to the police union would improve the safety of Victorians then the party would have wasted no time in widely advertising those promises. Such a failure reveals that the deal wasn't about what was in the best interests of the public -- it was about giving the union what it wanted in exchange for the union supporting the re-election of the ALP.
It would be ridiculous for any politician to seek support from voters on the basis that some of its policies would be public and some would be secret. Yet this is exactly what Steve Bracks did. Confidential election deals make a mockery of the democratic process.
The police and the courts are our most powerful civil institutions. Police have a legal monopoly on the use of violence against citizens, and courts have the exclusive authority of imprisonment. So much is obvious. And because these institutions wield such power, it is imperative that the control exercised by ministers over the police and courts is transparent and accountable. It is to avoid politicians being tempted to abuse their power that the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption in Queensland recommended that governments should not deal in secret with police unions.
When the Premier negotiated in private with the police union without the knowledge of Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon, he undermined democratic control over the police force. Under our system of government the chief commissioner is responsible for the operations of the police, the chief commissioner is responsible to the police minister and the police minister is responsible to Parliament.
These responsibilities are publicly scrutinised by Parliament itself, the media, and, ultimately, by the electorate. That system no longer operates in Victoria. Instead, the Premier is now personally managing the police force in secret co-operation with the police union.
The Government has attempted to portray the fact that the Chief Commissioner was in ignorance of the Premier's bargains as being an issue only between the commissioner and the union. Actually the real issue is between the Premier and the people of Victoria. As Frank Costigan, who chaired the royal commission on organised crime, said last week, "Governments do secret deals with the police union at their peril and ultimately at the peril of the community".
So far it appears that the Premier believes that this matter will simply go away. Hopefully the Victorian public hasn't become so accustomed to the various scandals currently engulfing state Labor governments that it has stopped caring about this one. But the signs are not good. Those who should be loudly protesting have been strangely silent.
It's nice that human rights lawyers and civil liberties groups campaign for suspected terrorists who go overseas to fight for the Taliban. If only those same human rights lawyers and civil liberties groups cared as much about what was happening in their own backyard. Political interference in police operations is a fundamental breach of the rule of law and a grave threat to civil liberties.
Those who complain about real and imagined human rights violations committed by the Federal Coalition Government must apply the same standard to the Victorian Labor Government. So far they haven't.
It might be that they are more interested in playing partisan politics than in upholding the values they profess to believe in. Or maybe they are afraid to speak out against their friends in the ALP for fear of jeopardising their chances of judicial preferment.
Transparency was a fine concept when Labor was in Opposition. In government, it's a different matter. It was only by accident that the deal was made public, and as yet there's been no indication from the Premier that he ever intended to reveal the contents of the deal.
Labor has initiated a "Charter of Rights and Responsibilities". But the charter is nothing more than law-making grandstanding. It provides no protection against assaults on the right of Victorians to know about the relationship between their Government and their police force.
It is a scandal that the deal was entered into in the first place, and it is a scandal that the Premier claims he's done nothing wrong.
And it will be a scandal if the Victorian public tolerates what's happened.
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