Gladys Berejiklian owes Australia an apology over Ruby Princess
In unprecedented times like these, nobody expects perfection from our leaders, but some common sense and an ability to do everything possible to keep us safe would be nice, writes David Penberthy.
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Gladys Berejiklian doesn’t owe an explanation and apology to the people of NSW.
Gladys Berejiklian owes an explanation and an apology to the nation.
Most pointedly, she owes an explanation, an apology and probably also financial compensation to families who have lost loved ones and are now attending funerals (with no more than 10 guests) as a result of her Government’s abysmal handling of the Ruby Princess cruise ship fiasco.
As so many people are laid to rest, we have seen deaths of a different, conceptual kind courtesy of the NSW Government.
We have witnessed the death of ministerial accountability with the creation of a sham police investigation, a pathetic backside-covering, time-buying exercise so that the premier and her ministers can shut down scrutiny.
We have witnessed the death of transparency, with the craven announcement by the NSW Government that it will no longer reveal the number of infections and deaths linked to that cursed cruise ship, under the laughable excuse of not wanting to compromise the police investigation.
If anyone should be charged in this mess it is Gladys Berejiklian, with wasting police resources by ordering an investigation into a shambles her useless government created.
The cast of actors in this is a veritable who’s who of some of the great mediocrities in public life in Australia.
At the state level, with a few commendable exceptions such as former police spokesman Andrew Tink, key players in this affair can be carbon-dated back to that period of sustained uselessness delivered by the NSW Liberals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they failed to provide any effective competition or scrutiny to the Carr Labor Government for a full three terms.
During that wasted period the NSW Liberals last held power under John Fahey, who somehow managed to win the Sydney Olympics but still lose the election in 1995, after which the party vacillated and squabbled its way through four leaders in record time. Premier Carr saw off Peter Collins, Kerry Chikarovski, John Brogden and Peter Debnam in less than a decade, and was under such little parliamentary pressure during that period he was even caught teaching himself German from a high school textbook during Question Time.
They were no good as an Opposition and now some of them, principally NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard, are demonstrating they aren’t any good in government either.
I know that period of NSW Liberal politics intimately as I was part of a four-member team in the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s Macquarie St, where as shadow family services minister Mr Hazzard would trawl the gallery corridors trying to get a run, becoming haughty if his lame press releases weren’t afforded the same reverence as the sermon from the mount.
A colleague and I had a row with him one day when he made the phenomenally tasteless claim that community services minister Faye Lo Po “didn’t care if children died”, and couldn’t understand why we weren’t keen on publishing his sick assertion.
It is telling to contrast the accountability he demanded then, personally blaming a battling minister in the cruellest terms for the private actions of derelict parents, versus his and his department’s determination to deny any complicity in the mismanagement of this boat.
These are the facts. On March 19, almost 2700 travellers from the Ruby Princess were released without health checks into the community on the say-so of NSW Health. The vessel is the largest single source of COVID-19 with almost 700 cases and at last count 13 deaths nationally.
The Australian’s NSW political editor Yoni Bashan established as fact this week that NSW Health officials did not board the Ruby Princess to test passengers for the virus, even though the liner’s on-board doctor told them explicitly there were sick travellers on the ship, at a time when cruise ships had been identified worldwide as virus supercarriers.
Bashan obtained emails showing NSW officials dismissed concerns about the health of passengers and told the ship it was “free to disembark” without further tests.
There have been some who are determined to implicate the Federal Government and principally the much-maligned Peter Dutton in the affair. They even include the NSW Premier herself, who out the side of her mouth told the NSW Party Room two weeks ago that the feds had a bit of explaining to do, only for her comments to be leaked by her own MPs who knew backside-covering when they saw it.
Australian Border Force is not a health body. When the NSW Ports Authority contacted the ABF on March 19 saying they had concerns about passengers, the ABF checked it out with NSW Health, who told them the ship had been cleared.
All roads in this scandal lead to NSW. In the Westminster system, those roads terminate at Brad Hazzard’s desk.
Not so. You can hear Hazzard positioning himself to weasel out of trouble with his comments this week.
“The community should be satisfied that we had the best of the best making the decision,” he said. That’s the mealy-mouthed remark you’d expect from a B-grade politician with one eye on self preservation, as it affords him the chance down the track to shrug his shoulders and say, well, the best of the best had an off day, don’t blame me.
It’s a testament to the flimsy grip Berejiklian has on the premiership that she hasn’t acted against Hazzard and has left him there like a wet fish on the frontbench. So too with her insipid response to frontbencher Don Harwin’s decision to get some “fresh air” at his Pearl Beach holiday home while the rest of the country is getting text messages from Canberra ordering us to stay home.
At a time when this country needs clear leadership the biggest state has failed massively. Normally, that’s not a matter of life or death.