Peta Credlin: Daniel Andrews needs to step up to save Australia from virus spread
The Victorian government should be punished for its incompetence, arrogance, double standards and cover-ups. Yet Premier Daniel Andrews can still redeem himself if he takes decisive action now, Peta Credlin writes.
Opinion
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With a fourfold increase in average daily new infections over the past fortnight, the coronavirus in Victoria is close to slipping out of control. We all know the reasons for this: principally, the Victorian government’s inexcusable failure to run quarantine hotels properly; and sub-par capability at tracing contacts, compounded by a refusal to accept military help when offered by the federal government.
But all of that is history. The challenge now is to get on top of this disease before it overwhelms us the way it’s largely overwhelmed the United States.
The reason why this is so serious for everyone, not just Victorians, is that you can’t isolate Australia from a state the way you can isolate Australia from the world.
So if disease becomes rampant in Victoria it is only a matter of time before it becomes rampant throughout the country, with all that means in terms of further lockdowns, more deaths and worse long-term damage to the economy.
Thanks to relatively early bans on flights from China and the eventual quarantining of all incoming travellers, Australia had the coronavirus almost completely under control.
From late April until late June, daily new infections were close to single figures and were almost entirely among people returning from overseas.
To keep the disease sufficiently suppressed to substantially reopen the domestic economy, all we had to do was keep good quarantine.
Thanks to quarantine hotels run by the police and military, that’s exactly what was happening — except in Victoria, which has turned out to be the gaping hole in the net.
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At some point, recriminations will not just be understandable but necessary. The Victorian government should be punished for its incompetence, arrogance, double standards and cover-ups.
Yet Premier Daniel Andrews can still redeem himself if he takes decisive action now, while it still might work, to save his state and our country from the health emergency that has caused so many deaths overseas.
It would help if he would own up to his government’s mistakes and apologise for them but the main thing is for him to claw back this situation while he still can.
Seven years ago, our country faced a crisis on its borders. For too long illegal arrivals by boat into Australia had been mismanaged by a government that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to control the flow or to stop the boats; and by a lack of organisation on the ground and on the water.
We had allowed our sovereignty to fall into the hands of people-smugglers and many feared we had lost the fight.
But two things turned it around: first, a change of government that meant business with a total determination to stop the boats come what may, and second, tearing down old structures to create a new one that put everyone working to this aim under unified command.
Many said it couldn’t be fixed but within three months, the boats that had been coming at the rate of 5000 illegal arrivals a month, and a trafficking trade thought to be out of control, had all but completely stopped.
Now I accept that a people-smuggler and a virus pathogen are very different things but what’s the same is the need for the complex, unwieldy beast we know as the bureaucracy to work hand in glove with a multitude of state and federal agencies to pull off the almost impossible. It requires the navigation of a lot of service delivery, policing, health and community messaging — spanning ministers and their egos — to all pull in the same direction; where any slip could cost a life. Again, not the same but not dissimilar to trying to stem the loss of lives at sea — indeed, to date more died trying to get to Australia at that time than have died from this virus.
But resolving this second-wave crisis is likely harder for Andrews than perhaps the Abbott government, largely because this is a mess of his own making, made worse by his refusal to
admit what’s wrong and reshape how they’re tackling this challenge.
The temptation will be to try to make it someone else’s fault, to call for further meetings and to demand more resources, but the problems are functional, not fiscal.
Clearly, the left hand and the right hand haven’t been working together and ministerial incompetence has been some of the worst I’ve ever seen.
None of that’s changed; indeed everything that helped Victoria fail so spectacularly is still as it was. The Premier will say we can’t change personnel in the middle of a crisis, but often that’s what must happen.
To the extent that his ministers are not up to the job, they should be sacked or shifted. To the extent that senior Victorian officials have proved timid or demoralised, they should be moved on.
We will be fighting this virus for months and months to come in the absence of a vaccine so he must reshape how that’s done because to date it’s only delivered failure.
With an election not due until November 2022, the time for Victorians to deliver judgment on Daniel Andrews can’t come soon enough, but it’s not now. Now is the time Victoria must get this outbreak under control or risk dragging the whole country backwards.
And everyone outside Victoria needs to understand the stakes because what Victoria is fighting now is not the same as we were all fighting back in March and April.
This isn’t a second wave — this is the first wave of true community transmission — the sort of virulent spread that’s brought New York and London to their knees.
Before, it was mainly returning travellers in our numbers, now it is so much harder to fight because it’s families, streets, suburbs and schools.
If I had more faith in Victoria’s tracing capacity, I would be more confident than I am that they can get on top of the numbers, but given the failures to date, next week will be the real test.
If we don’t see things stabilise then serious consideration must be given to a short but harder shutdown. It will be unpopular but sometimes unpopular is what’s right.