Peta Credlin: We must demand answers on COVID deaths in Victoria

If we want the truth from our military about how people were killed in Afghanistan, we must also demand it from our political leaders about why people died in Victoria, Peta Credlin writes.

How is it that we can have 19 special forces soldiers accused of unlawful killings in Afghanistan and, before any legal process to determine guilt or innocence has even begun, moves are under way to strip 3000 of their fellow comrades of their meritorious unit citation, including 20 killed in action earning it? Yet in Victoria, a failed government program leads to the death of 800 of our own, and we’re told to look the other way?

Worse than that, we’re served up a Board of Inquiry chaired by Jennifer Coate that’s a long way from finding the truth; with the lawyer in me questioning whether the government was ever interested in finding it from the outset.

The blizzard of new recollections and conversations that no one had previously bothered to tell the Coate Inquiry — all disclosed in affidavits released late on Friday afternoon, thus missing media deadlines — shows what a travesty it is not to put people back in the witness box and cross-examine them.

Yet the inquiry did not recall any witnesses, nor was much in the way of cross-examination allowed even when they were there under oath. Since the last witness gave evidence, there’s been the resignations of the Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet Chris Eccles, and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Kym Peake.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Chris Hopkins

Given the importance of their roles and now conflicting versions of the truth, the idea that you just let their evidence go uncontested is staggering, particularly as Mikakos resigned declaring of the Premier’s sworn testimony, that “there are elements in it that I strongly disagree with” and saying she “cannot continue to serve in his cabinet”.

No one in Melbourne’s legal circles finds this credible. Nor does anyone who has ever worked in the Andrews government buy the line that no actual decision was made to use private security in hotel quarantine but instead that it was a “creeping assumption”.

Does anyone actually believe that Daniel Andrews would have fronted the media on Friday, March 27 and announced a policy rejecting a unanimous decision by national cabinet a mere two hours earlier yet had nothing himself to do with it, nor remember who did? No, I didn’t think so.

The one thing his cheer-squad and critics agree on is that Daniel Andrews is all powerful and there’s not a decision made in Victoria that he doesn’t personally sign off.

In his second affidavit released on Friday, Andrews says he expressed “no view” about the use of private security. In yet another of Friday’s affidavits, Police Minister Lisa Neville admitted she got a call straight out of national cabinet from the Premier’s chief of staff telling her about the decision to set up hotel quarantine.

In her earlier testimony to Coate, Neville said: “I understood from the phone call I had already received (from the Premier’s Office) and the discussion at the meeting (involving the police commissioner and emergency management commissioner shortly thereafter) that the broad structure of the hotel quarantine program and use of private security … had already been decided.”

Even now, the Premier’s chief of staff has never been called to the witness stand.

The Premier wants us to believe now that he wasn’t involved in “operational decisions”. If so, why was he calling Andrew Crisp during the first meeting of Operation Soteria when it was laying out all of the ground rules for hotel quarantine?

We know Daniel Andrews called because it is on the official recording of the meeting — and straight after the Premier’s call, on the issue of the ADF being used, Crisp said “at this stage we don’t see a need for boots on the ground”.

Australian special forces soldiers have been accused of unlawful killings in Afghanistan. Picture: Ian Hitchcock/Getty

I found the use of the word “we” immediately after the Premier’s call illuminating. Why hasn’t this been properly tested under cross-examination, because it appears to contradict Andrews claim he didn’t believe any offer of ADF support was “extensive”, despite him thanking the PM for it in his press release the same day? What about Professor Brett Sutton’s sworn testimony to Coate that he didn’t know about the use of private security in hotel quarantine “until May”, and new emails released on Friday showing he was angry at being “excluded” weeks earlier?

Indeed, in one email on 13 April, Sutton complained that it was “astounding” he wasn’t more heavily involved; that it was a “source of unease — moral and legal”.

It seems the truth is now catching up with Brett Sutton. Just as it did when he said he shut down the Cedar Meats abattoir as soon as he found out about the outbreak on 29 April but, as we now know, his own health department was funnelling infected workers into the Rydges Hotel from 22 April with a specifically signed health direction from his deputy, Anneliese van Diemen.

It won’t be long before Professor Sutton moves on. So too Andrew Crisp, Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner, who told the parliamentary inquiry he briefed his minister, Lisa Neville, regularly throughout this crisis, as required under law, but after she said otherwise to Coate, he changed his evidence. I have no doubt that this former 40-year police veteran did brief Neville; but once his testimony was changed not to contradict the minister, he put himself on the wrong side of the Emergency Management Act and must go.

Columnist Peta Credlin.

Or the minister could do the honourable thing and go first. But, given there’s very little honour in this government, I won’t hold my breath. Andrew Crisp is, after all, the senior official who tried to bring in the ADF in late June, knowing full well hotel quarantine processes had broken down.

He secured 850 troops yet, 12 hours later, he was rolled by the Premier and they never arrived. Back then, Victoria only had 20 COVID deaths. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders now what might have happened if Crisp had got his way.

Again, for a Premier who tells Coate he isn’t involved in “operational decisions” after this episode, an email is sent to Crisp from Chris Eccles on June 25 demanding that from here on in, new rules mean that any decisions involving the ADF must be signed off personally by the Premier.

The proposition that no one actually made the decision to use private security — that it was a “creeping assumption” that somehow emerged from no one and from nowhere to become the operational reality — is ludicrous. The idea that the Jobs Department head Simon Phemister would execute a $30m contract with a non-approved provider without specific authorisation from someone higher up the chain of command is laughable. But more disturbing is that the recipient of this taxpayer largesse, Unified Security’s David Millward, was never called to the witness stand.

Where is the proper interrogation of Jobs Minister Martin Pakula and his evidence that he knew nothing about this Unified contract until “July or August”.

In opening her inquiry, former judge Jennifer Coate said, “I have one aim only in this inquiry: to conduct it with the forensic rigour and completeness that is expected of me and that is rightly deserved by the people of Victoria.”

What Victorians deserve is the full picture about what happened and who did what — which they still don’t have.

There’s a concerted campaign under way from the #Istandwithdan mob to make us all forget what really happened here and, now that restrictions have eased, to sweep this catastrophic failure under the carpet.

But if we want the truth from our military about how people were killed in Afghanistan, surely we must also demand it from our political leaders about why people died in Victoria?

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: We must demand answers on COVID deaths in Victoria