How a catalogue of failures turned Victoria into a virus timebomb
Guards trading sex for hotel guests’ freedom. Shocking frontline scandals. Blunders and buck-passing. This is the must-read inside story on a catalogue of coronavirus failures that let a silent killer creep back into Melbourne.
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Another day, another scandal.
Daniel Andrews was applying his well-versed solemnity to his virus rhetoric of punishment and protection.
It was June 17, and his campaign in the coronavirus fight had got the wobbles. Over the previous week, after a day of no new cases, the daily numbers had steadily risen: from four to eight to 12.
Victoria was being shrouded in the silent wisps of a second wave. Not that Victorians knew it: the rest of the country was taking the first tentative steps after COVID-19.
Andrews had other issues. Two days before, he had sacked his minister Adam Somyurek over branch-stacking allegations. Footage of private conversations had exposed a political party riven with treacheries and schemes. Two more ministers would go.
The Victorian ALP was to be folded in disgrace into the federal branch. The leader who repeatedly said he took “full responsibility” for his ministers’ behaviour had, paradoxically, been granted more political power than any other modern premier because of his ministers’ poor behaviour.
The optics were bad. Andrews’ militant tone, on both political chicaneries and virus controls, was grating against perceptions.
Close observers refer to Andrews’ political acumen, his instinct for sounding committed while at the same time dancing from the damning truths. His critics call it arrogance or hubris.
Andrews needed a distraction. He spoke at length about the “unacceptable” behaviour within the Victorian ALP. Then he lobbed a hoary chestnut westwards. Here was Nero, fiddling frantically, as Melbourne smouldered in a pandemic’s fightback.
SCANDALS THAT HAVE ROCKED THE ANDREWS GOVERNMENT
“Why would you want to go there?” he asked of South Australia, which had declared its borders would remain closed to Victorians.
South Australia duly reciprocated the sledge: the Adelaide Advertiser spoke of Andrews as the “the scandal-ridden Premier of virus-plagued Victoria”.
The headline was apt. As Andrews spoke in a garden backdrop, the virus lurked in hotels only a few kilometres away, about to reassert its place as the starting point for Victoria’s way of life.
Few knew then the damage was already done, that systemic mismanagement unique to Victoria had fostered the virus’ resurgence.
Victoria’s pandemic response was rotting from the core outwards. The menace had been ticking since March 27, even as the official daily case numbers fell through April, and Victorians wondered how long it would be before they could visit their mothers again.
The people of Victoria had almost universally abided by the ever-shifting restrictions. They had jumped at little or no notice.
What lay deeper was a demoralising truth. Their government was failing them even as its representatives implored, compelled and urged Victorians to try harder.
Victorians were to be captives in their own homes because the Andrews government’s system of defence had allowed wholesale breaches in its front line.
We were not, as the catchcry went, “all in this together”. The rules where they mattered most — the barrier aimed at shielding Victorians from a virus imported from the rest of the world – had been discarded, overlooked and ignored.
Such failings did not happen in NSW, Queensland or South Australia.
Melburnians have behaved no better nor worse than their interstate counterparts.
Yet their state teeters once again on the cusp of a full-blown health crisis.
Welcome to Victoria: The Infected State.
THE SEEDS OF DISASTER
The reasons for Victoria’s pariah status get blurred in half-truths and speculations. Bureaucratic snafus and once-anonymous public servants have seeped into the discussion. But straight lines of fault can be identified.
Victoria chose to use private security firms, as opposed to the police or the Australian Defence Force, to supervise the lock-up of returned travellers.
When a security guard contracted the virus, he passed it to a close contact. It’s a simple daisy chain, much as it was when a soldier who travelled from Melbourne to Sydney in a carriage, spread the Spanish flu to Sydney hospital staff, and triggered the last lockdown of the NSW-Vic border in 1919.
Multiply the security guard example several times over. At least 49 cases of infection of security guards or their close contacts had been reported.
The virus strains have been genomically linked to much of the wider spread in Melbourne’s north and west; indeed no analysed virus strains of recent weeks had been detected in Victoria before April.
Security guard failings at quarantine hotels is why Melbourne is in lockdown now. These guards are Uber drivers and nightclub bouncers.
They have been largely underpaid and untrained, and some of them don’t appear on security company books. They are the Typhoid Marys who caught the virus and took it home to their families.
A single gathering accounts for at least 14 cases. A wider family gathered for Eid, the end of the Muslim holy month, in Coburg in late May. At the time, house guests were limited to five.
Another family cluster in Keilor Downs numbered 19. That spread after six families met together.
Both the Coburg and Keilor Downs clusters trace directly or indirectly to security guards. Notions of an individual “superspreader” have been superseded by the theory of a “single-source infection”.
Rather than one guard or close contact spreading the virus, it’s more likely that several guards spread an identical virus strain through the community.
On June 28, Andrews attributed one of the hotel spreads to the exchange of a cigarette lighter; an “apparently innocent thing”.
Less innocuous are allegations about other failings. The Herald Sun has exposed inadequate supplies of masks and gloves, poor infection control protocols and a lack of social distancing.
One scandalised hotel employee has spoken of shenanigans that defy the law, the spirit of the system, and every measure of common decency. Over drinks after his shift, he said guards at his hotel had been trading sex for letting guests out.
Here’s the thing. The private security industry reeked of underhandedness and secrecy before the pandemic.
AN INDUSTRY UNDER A CLOUD
The Andrews government, in late 2018, launched a review to investigate training, industry standards, proper pay and monitoring of compliance. What of “ghosting”, a common industry recurrence, when guards work a shift without actually turning up?
Or subcontracting, in which companies tender at rates that preclude paying employees lawfully?
Some COVID-19 hotel contracts – awarded to three companies, MSS, Unified and Wilson — were said to be handballed to smaller companies. Lines of responsibility and accountability smudged. Employers and employees were strangers to one another.
Wilson, a big operator, says it has had no staff infected by COVID-19. It couldn’t accept work for more than two hotels because it lacked the people.
Industry rumours persist about another operator working at nine to 15 hotels when it was not on an approved list of government suppliers.
Some guards received “three minutes’ training”, according to a UWU organiser. Guards were working shifts at different hotels, amplifying the potential spread.
Personal protective equipment was worn incorrectly or for too long, and the system lacked the required medical supervision.
Guards were seen to hug and touch one another. One guard said guards at one hotel received a single face mask and glove before a shift of supervising a hotel floor.
Some who had been told to self-isolate continued in other jobs such as Uber driving.
Compare this slipshod approach to nurses at major metropolitan hospitals, who replace their PPE after every patient exchange, and who avoid contact with loved ones until they have showered.
Some health workers, despite the strict protocols, have been infected at various Melbourne hospitals.
The risks are plain, as are the consequences of patchy protocols. So why award a shadowy industry the most critical role of blocking the virus threat from overseas?
A VERY POOR CHOICE
It seems the state government sought to combine health imperatives and economic benefit. Perhaps the error was conceptual: to fill two holes with one program.
The hotel quarantine program was run under the $500m COVID-19 employment scheme. Almost 1300 guards have been employed under the Working for Victoria program.
Unlike other states, hotel quarantine in Victoria hasn’t been overseen by health authorities, but instead the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions.
The state government faced a compressed timeline and unprecedented pressures when it gave the hotel security jobs, without tender, to private companies from March 27.
A nationwide offer from the federal government for the free deployment of Australian Defence Force personnel was spurned by Victoria. So was a National Cabinet recommendation the police or ADF carry out the duties.
At first, the decision was held up as a “bit of a good news story”. On May 12, a member of state parliament’s public accounts and estimates committee asked Andrews about support of the hotel industry.
“To all the staff doing catering, doing all the work that makes this possible, I want to say thank you on behalf of all Victorians. They have done a great job. We have hotels large and small … They have done a really impressive job … It is just common sense, it is logical and it has made a massive difference to stopping the spread of this virus.”
Yet the program has spread, rather than stopped, the virus. As Liberal MP Tim Smith asks: “What on earth would the Department of Jobs know about running hotel quarantine for a viciously contagious virus?”
Not much, it seems.
Take Sam, a COVID-19 security guard, who spoke to Channel 9 last week about his employers urging him not to get tested, despite working on premises where COVID-19 had been identified.
Sam received no training on infection control. “When I knew there were positive cases in the hotel, I asked them: ‘Do I need to go for a test or something?’,” he said.
“And they said, ‘No, no, no, don’t worry, don’t stress, because we need people, so if you (go) for a test they will ask you to self-isolate, so don’t go’,” he said.
Over months, Victorians had learned to analyse the daily case numbers. The later in the day the announcement, generally the worse the news.
These numbers dictated what Victorians could do and could not do, and whether any easing of restrictions was foreseeable.
Everyone knew someone who had to self-isolate because of perceived proximity to the virus.
The Black Lives Matter protest on June 6 shifted the mindset: if thousands can mass in the face of a tepid official response, is the threat as significant as it was?
What Victorians did not know was that the curve of the numbers hinged on random variables.
The state’s future was beholden to the whims and wiles of apparently unaccountable private security guards.
Were security guards trading sex for freedom? Is this the behaviour that spoiled hundreds of millions of dollars invested in resistance and triggered a second round of unfathomable hardships?
Who was enforcing the rules on the rule enforcers?
SHIRKING BLAME
The hotel breakdowns were “unacceptable”, said Andrews. Yet pointing out where the blame lies has not been a priority.
Pressure was applied to Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, when it was reported he and health authorities were made aware of poor hotel practices in late April.
Sutton replied the choice of security guards was not his, and nor was the
program’s governance. Observers at a press conference firmly believe Sutton wanted to underscore his lack of control by repeatedly stating he “looked forward” to giving evidence to the judicial inquiry.
Martin Pakula is the Jobs, Tourism and Major Events Minister. His department employed the security guards.
Pakula has “explicitly denied” he set out to employ members of the United Workers’ Union, which he is associated with.
“It’s scurrilous and untrue, and I’m not going to let scurrilous and untrue accusations which are not backed up by a shred of evidence to go unchallenged,” Pakula said on Friday.
Some are not convinced. Federal Liberal MP Tim Wilson has claimed union mates were prioritised ahead of the collective health of Victorians. Opposition observers are gleefully reciting whispers that Pakula has been isolated by fellow cabinet ministers should a senior scalp be required.
Police command has said privately, along with the Police Association, that the force had no objection with working side-by-side with Defence personnel.
Those with experience of both the Victoria and NSW health departments say the Victorian model is inefficient, duplicitous and plodding in its decision-making. An infectious-diseases expert, Lindsay Grayson, wrote this week that the Victorian department is “one of the worst-funded and dysfunctionally organised in the nation”.
National guidelines for the daily tracing of close contacts were not adhered to, according to a report by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee.
On Wednesday, Andrews admitted the growing scope of detection-tracing efforts stood to overwhelm the health department. “You get to a point … where you just can’t find enough people to manage a group that’s doubling and doubling again,” he said.
Sutton, as head medical officer, is less senior than his NSW counterpart. His boss, deputy health department secretary Melissa Skilbeck, was relieved of her coronavirus duties as the hotel quarantine scandal grew.
The judicial inquiry may lead to awkward conclusions, yet the time it needs to investigate has served to deflect the vocal demands for immediate answers.
EMAIL EXPOSES PLEA TO ADF DURING HOTEL QUARANTINE FIASCO
THE FIGHT FOR ANSWERS
Launching an inquiry allowed government ministers to effectively hide in plain sight. Questions are multiplying about its terms of reference — will it cover policy decisions? — and the fact it cannot compel witnesses to answer all questions. Andrews has aimed to focus dialogue on the issues that can be controlled. Yet ordinary Victorians want to understand the systemic mistakes under his leadership.
Blots litter the handling in Victoria, as they do elsewhere, notably in NSW’s handling of the Ruby Princess cruise ship.
But Victorian government choices have been at odds with those interstate. When three in 10 hotel guests refused testing, they were subsequently released into the community anyway.
On rough estimates, more than 5000 guests had walked out of quarantine without being tested.
State Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen, in disclosing the testing rate, said state authorities were “pretty happy” with testing levels. The then federal chief medical officer Brendan Murphy, disagreed.
Victoria’s refusal rate was far higher than any other state. “But states have the powers … to say to someone, ‘Well, we won’t let you out of quarantine until you’ve been tested and had a clear test’,” he said.
Only now, after three months of hotel quarantining, did Victoria invoke a 10-day extension of stay if guests refused a test. It was three days after NSW had done the same thing.
In late June, Victoria requested 1000 Australian Defence Force personnel to provide frontline support. Andrew Crisp, the Emergency Management Commissioner, asked and he received.
“We’re stepping in at Victoria’s request to assist them,” said federal Health Minister Greg Hunt.
The next morning, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds was praising the ADF’s unsullied record in containing the virus spread across the country.
Then, the Victorian request was downgraded: only 200 medically related Defence personnel would help.
Instead of the ADF, prison officers and airline staff were to be used. A job advert on the Qantas internal site stated airline staff could apply their “positive influencing skills” to hotel quarantine.
International flights to Melbourne have been rerouted for now.
It all seems a bit late.
Metropolitan Melbourne is fenced by police patrols, and captive residents of the nine Flemington towers, which now number hundreds of cases, complained of little food, support or medical oversight.
Scenes of surrounding police, coupled with a failed escape bid, conjure comparisons with China’s handling of the pandemic.
Andrews has tried his own influencing skills in recent days.
“I am the leader of this government and I take responsibility and have accountability for these and all matters,” Andrews said last week. “I’ve never walked away from that, ever, nor would I.”
Yet the mood has shifted. The rise of Dictator Dan, as he has been labelled, may have mortally wounded Teflon Dan. On Tuesday, Andrews tipped responsibility for the second wave on ordinary Victorians. Everyone knew someone who wasn’t following the rules, he said.
His tone, like a minister admonishing his parishioners, was poorly received. If Andrews was pointing a finger, he got a raised finger in response. On Wednesday, a sign hung over the Nepean Highway in Parkdale that said: “FU Daniel Andrews it’s your fault not ours”.
THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF ALL
Andrews has survived many scandals, from the minister who got his dogs chauffeured in a government car to the Red Shirts scheme ahead of the 2014 election. He has always stared down the hyenas of scrutiny. But will his approach still work?
The hotel quarantine scandal is being compared, unfavourably, to the ALP’s poor handling of the 1990s recession. It is a turning point, a spark that relit, as Andrews calls it, “the public health bushfire”.
On Tuesday, a journalist asked Andrews whether he would resign. It was an unthinkable question when Andrews spoke at a press conference of “unacceptable” ALP behaviours a few weeks earlier. As 3AW’s Neil Mitchell says of the Premier who refuses to go on his radio show: “It’s taken the wider world years to twig.”
Three weeks after Andrews joked about not wanting to cross the SA border, Victoria was past tired jokes about parochialism. We couldn’t cross the border whether we wanted to or not. Our pandemic response was a ticking time bomb. It had been so fundamentally flawed that it risked not only our state but the entire nation.
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Originally published as How a catalogue of failures turned Victoria into a virus timebomb