OK, jumping back to South Australia where opposition leader Peter Malinauskas has condemned the premier’s decision not to dismiss his deputy premier and attorney general Vicky Chapman after the parliament passed a vote of no confidence against her.
Malinauskas told ABC News Breakfast that this was “a truly extraordinary state of affairs, if not a constitutional crisis”.
It’s an incredibly unfortunate state of affairs in South Australia where premier Steven Marshall has decided to almost literally tear up the rulebook of convention that’s been established over hundreds of years of the Westminster system of government and ignore the parliament’s will [for him to] ask Vickie Chapman to resign her position at deputy premier.
There’s been a motion of no confidence passed in the deputy premier. This is unprecedented. Everybody seems to be putting their fingers in their ears and pretending nothing has happened, particularly the premier himself.
What I accept and what I’ve always defended and been a very strong supporter of is people’s right to protest. But if it’s not peaceful, it’s not protest and it’s something very different.
We have seen extremists, rabid anti-vaxxer and others making all sorts of threats, threats against me, my wife and my kids. That is not my focus, this is about every family’s safety and that’s why we have to work together and that’s what Victorians have done.
