Peta Credlin: Daniel Andrews better get hotel quarantine right this time

If it’s taken less than a week to import five new COVID cases to Victoria, by God Daniel Andrews better have hotel quarantine sorted this time around.

By God I hope Daniel Andrews knows what he’s doing second time around.

With Victoria’s hotel quarantine system back up and running, it’s taken less than a week to import five new cases of coronavirus and end our 43-day run of zero infections. I appreciate that once we reopened the state to returning travellers, we were always going to see new cases but the real concern I think we all share is that this new quarantine system is really as robust as the Premier says it is.

I mean, forgive my scepticism, but that’s what we were told last time weren’t we – that we didn’t need the ADF or police to secure hotels (clearly we did) and that our contract tracing as good as NSW (only it wasn’t)?

I have no confidence that the Coate Inquiry has done the forensic work needed to learn the lessons of the Andrews Government’s catastrophic handling of our second wave.

Despite his spin and the trolling by his army of activists, Daniel Andrews didn’t end Victoria’s second wave, we did. Picture: Gary Ramage

To this day, no one knows who made the fateful decisions that locked up Melbourne for four months or how a $30 million security contract was awarded with no due diligence. None of this is plausible; and I don’t believe throwing a few bureaucrats under the bus, as the Premier has done, is any real fix either.

We’re told there’s no private security used in this new quarantine model and that police are in charge but what Andrews glosses over is the fact that police are not the only ones on the frontline; indeed hundreds of ex-Qantas flight crew have been on contracts for months to guard these hotel guests even when Victoria’s quarantine programme was shut down, and the rooms were empty.

Despite his spin and the trolling by his army of activists, Daniel Andrews didn’t end Victoria’s second wave, we did — by doing the hard yards and shutting down our lives in order to protect our state’s most vulnerable; and praising his government is like shaking hands with the arsonist who lights the fire but then helps the fire brigade to put it out.

We’ve only just started to taste freedom again and feel optimistic about the summer ahead. Let’s hope he stays away from the matches.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Daniel Andrews better get hotel quarantine right this time