Peta Credlin: The quarantine questions that need answers

It’s hard to see the Coate Inquiry into hotel quarantine, and the 800 deaths that resulted from its failure, being anything other than a whitewash, writes Peta Credlin.

I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to see the Coate Inquiry into hotel quarantine, and the 800 deaths that resulted from its failure, being anything other than a whitewash.

There are essentially three issues that the report being released on Monday must answer: who made the decision to use private security guards; why was an unapproved firm given a $30 million contract; and why was the offer of Australian Defence Force support rejected twice — in March, and later in June.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews still has questions to answer about his hotel quarantine program, writes Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Daniel Pockett

It’s almost impossible to believe that the Premier had nothing to do with a Victorian decision to “go it alone” and not use the police and military. Especially given that it was a phone call from the then-head of the Premier’s Department that allowed the then-Police Commissioner to assure his federal counterpart that it would be private security and not police running hotel quarantine in Victoria.

It’s impossible that a decision to spend $30 million with an unapproved firm would not have required ministerial approval.

It’s impossible to credit that the Premier didn’t know that military help was always available when he’d earlier publicly thanked the federal government for just that.

Either the Victorian government runs on autopilot with no one really in charge or ministers and officials have been duplicitous in their responses to the inquiry.

Why was the military not used in the hotel quarantine program? Picture: NCA NewsWire/Sarah Matray

The inquiry never properly grilled Dan Andrews about how 850 troops could have been coming to Victoria on the morning of June 24 but not coming later in the day, at a stage when Victoria had scarcely 20 deaths.

It never called the head of the private security firm that so bungled its operations. It never pursued the head of the Jobs Department, who’d executed the relevant contract, on his own department’s misgivings about it, or on his dealings with the Premier’s chief of staff.

Another inquiry, though, has shed some light on how the Victorian government operates.

An Ombudsman’s report into the immediate indefinite lockdown of public housing towers on July 4 has established that it was NOT done on “specific health advice”.

Sure, the lockdown was probably justified by the explosion in COVID cases escaping from hotel quarantine, but so much for the Premier’s claim that it was “based on the best public health advice”.

Having seen him up close and personal this year more than ever, Daniel Andrews always reminds us of that old adage: “How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.”

Originally published as Peta Credlin: The quarantine questions that need answers