From Hamburg: You can forgive foreign countries for their domestic political quirks because it’s really none of your business, but when an Australian government decides to act like it’s East Germany, it’s hard to let it slide.
The ACT government has passed new laws that remove third-party appeals for public and community housing projects, a move designed to speed up construction by eliminating community input on development approvals. This decision strips residents of their ability to challenge government-backed housing initiatives through the usual legal channels, placing full control in the hands of the state.
Such a policy is socialist in intent because it prioritises central government planning over individual rights and local concerns. In a socialist system, the state dictates resource allocation without regard for private property interests or community objections, and this ban mirrors that approach by silencing dissent against state-directed housing.
The government claims this aligns the ACT with other states like New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia, where similar restrictions exist, but that does not justify overriding basic democratic processes. Further, the other states have more nuanced policies than those implemented in the ACT.
The ACT government’s central planning overreach has no place in Australia’s liberal democracy, where checks and balances, including the right to appeal government decisions, protect citizens from arbitrary power. Liberal democracies rely on community participation and judicial review to ensure fair outcomes, yet the ACT government’s action treats residents as obstacles to be removed rather than stakeholders to be consulted.
By banning appeals, the government undermines the principles of accountability and transparency that define Australian governance.
Rather than supporting the Australian dream so inelegantly put in the movie The Castle, the ACT Labor government is taking lessons from the 2003 German film Good Bye, Lenin!, where a young man’s mother (a devoted communist), awakes from a coma after the Berlin Wall came down. The son tries to recreate communist Germany to save his mother from a fatal shock, only to find out she had always wanted to escape communist Germany but had remained out of fear for her children’s lives.
How could anyone forget that nobody ran from West Berlin into East Berlin when the Wall came down? The ACT government’s socialist delusion can’t last for much longer, yet here we are.
The ACT government is some $11 billion in debt. The cost of servicing this debt will soon reach in excess of $2 million per day. The fastest growing expenditure category for the ACT government is interest on debt. Given the territory has over-extended its finances just to do the things governments are meant to do, further erosion of democratic norms are hardly the answer to the ACT’s social problems, many which stem from the state of the economy.
ACT residents are entitled to ask how much more of their money will be burnt before this rogue government stops trying to buy its way out of social problems it created through poor economic management in the first place.
Hopefully the Canberra Liberals’ new leader, former talk-back radio host Mark Parton (and the second leader since Elizabeth Lee’s infamous ‘giving the bird’ incident helped her lose the unlosable 2024 election) can get some traction before it’s too late.
But I suspect that, like Victoria, the ACT government will be bailed out by the Federal Politburo which is also located in Canberra.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
