WION Spotlight | Courting justice: Australia scraps Covid-era fines

In what may become a global landmark and inspire people in other robust democracies to seek reversal of unjust impositions by governments during the coronavirus pandemic, the Australian state of New South Wales has revoked 33,000 Covid fines totaling more than AUS$ 30 million.

Those who have already paid the fines will be refunded the amount.

NSW was forced to cancel the Covid-era fines after an adverse court ruling in a test case by Redfern Legal Centre (RLC), which argued that police did not provide enough details about the offence, which is a breach of the Fines Act.

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Yet, the government, instead of resisting the case for cancellation of Covid-19 fines, accepted the principle of the test case in two other cases pending before the court. And in what may even be commendable, extended the benefit of the principle to withdraw a total of 33,121 fines, out of the total 62,138 Covid-19 related fines issued. NSW was compelled to concede that the AUS$30m collected in fines for so-called “breaches” of Covid-era public health orders were “too vague”.

The case filed in public interest by RLC, the judiciary’s pathbreaking order and the executive’s response and prompt action are, in these times, exemplary institutional conduct. Neither the judiciary nor the executive saw it as a prestige issue. The government could have let the other two cases go on and waited for similar orders; and, worse, it could have resisted extending the benefit of the spirit and underlying principle of the court’s order to 33,000 others. That fact that it did not do so, for whatever reason, is worthy of emulation when people, especially those in financial distress, are involved.

It remains to be seen whether NSW scraps the fines on 29,000 others, too; or it chooses to force another legal contest over dubious fines for breach of vague “pandemic restrictions”, which may not hold up in court.

It would be interesting to see the aftermath: such as, whether the principle of undoing the injustice of dubious fines is taken up in other Australian states; or the federal government headed byPrime Minister Anthony Albanese steps in to ensure country-wide relief in this matter.

The court ruling and the NSW reversal of the fines come at a time when the Australian parliament made history with its censure of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison for taking advantage of Covid conditions to secretly grab several ministerial posts between March 2020 and May 2021.

If the parliamentary censure was a first for a former PM, so was his conduct. As Prime Minister Albanese succinctly put it: “This is the sort of tin-pot activity we would ridicule if it was in a non-democratic country. Scott Morrison was running a shadow government”.

The censure was preceded by an enquiry into what Albanese had described as “extraordinary” and “unprecedented trashing of our democracy”.

Parliament is expected to follow up the censure by changing the law to ensure that ministerial appointments are made public.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)