Report into Victoria’s COVID-19 hotel quarantine may not tell us who hired private security

While the long-awaited report into Victoria’s hotel quarantine program is over, we may never know who made the most fateful decision.

The report into the Andrews Government’s fatally-bungled hotel quarantine program will be released on Monday, with the public unlikely ever to know who made the fateful decision to hire private security guards.

Retired judge Jennifer Coate will hand over her final report into the $195 million quarantine program, following an inquiry which examined the quarantine breaches which seeded Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 and killed 801 people.

The inquiry ran for six months over 25 hearing days, examined 63 witnesses and received 60,000 documents amounting to 300,000 pages of evidence.

Yet it failed to identify who was responsible for the decision which had the biggest impact on the program’s ultimate failure – the hiring of private security guards, many of them poorly-trained, with language and cultural barriers, some of whom were working multiple jobs and who proved to be the wrong workforce to guard hotels housing infectious returning passengers from overseas.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has faced criticism over his handling of hotel quarantine, and for his appearance at the subsequent inquiry. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty

Counsel assisting the inquiry has described the decision to hire private security as a “starting assumption’’ that took hold after multiple senior people in Government failed to object to it.

The inquiry, which launched in July, has so far cost the careers of three key people involved in the program – Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, Department of Health and Human Service secretary Kym Peake and Premier Daniel Andrews’ right-hand man, chief bureaucrat Chris Eccles, all of whom resigned.

Other key figures including Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, former chief police commissioner Graham Ashton and Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp remain under significant pressure over their evidence.

Others open to criticism include Premier Andrews, who failed to take up multiple offers of assistance from the Australian Defence Force, claimed the ADF offer was never made, and was unable to say who made the decision to hire private security, despite earlier saying he took ultimate responsibility as premier.

Melbourne faced months of lockdown following the hotel quarantine outbreaks. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

The inquiry was delayed twice – once by the introduction of stage four lockdowns, and the second time by the failure of the DHHS to hand over documents.

In November, an interim report recommended the state consider a combination of hotel and home quarantine when it began accepting international returning passengers again, and to look at electronic bracelets and other technological monitoring.

Mr Andrews ignored these recommendations, citing National Cabinet concerns, when he re-started the program on December 7, instead confining it to hotels, although Victoria Police are providing a 24/7 presence.

The inquiry formally examined the “decisions and actions’’ of Victorian government agencies and private contractors, the communications between the agencies and with private companies, the contracts signed by the Government, and whether the appropriate training, guidance and equipment was provided.

Originally published as Report into Victoria’s COVID-19 hotel quarantine may not tell us who hired private security