Emergency powers under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 (Vic) are valid in all their applications to the implied freedom of political communication, because the statutory constraints on their availability and exercise (ministerial declaration, CHO authorisation, reasonable necessity, temporal and geographic limits, judicial review) ensure they cannot be exercised obnoxiously to the implied freedom. The structured proportionality analysis is to be conducted at the level of the authorising statute, not the particular directions, where the powers are not so broad and general as to require reading down. The role of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 in this context was left open.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 5 later cases that cite this judgment.
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