Peta Credlin: Gladys Berejiklian was Australia’s best premier during the pandemic

It stinks that a fine premier in Gladys Berejiklian is no longer NSW Premier while Daniel Andrews remains in charge in Victoria despite a litany of failures, writes Peta Credlin.

How could Gladys go yet Dan stay? There’s something wrong with our politics when the best state Premier has to resign while the worst seems to be Teflon-coated.

For the past two years, Gladys Berejiklian has been the one Premier who has taken freedom seriously, despite the pandemic, and has done her best to allow normal life to continue. She’s now gone, essentially because of an undeclared relationship with a former MP; not found guilty of anything, not even charged, just being investigated was enough.

Meanwhile, Victoria’s Daniel Andrews is seemingly invulnerable, with WorkSafe Victoria at pains to prosecute neither him nor any of his ministers and senior officials over the scandal that led to Victoria’s second wave and 800-plus deaths; fingering instead the anonymous “Department of Health” to be charged over failures in hotel quarantine, as if a corporation can somehow make decisions without the involvement of human beings!

It’s not just the people of NSW shaking their heads after Friday’s shock announcement. So many Australians in lockdown, Melburnians in particular, saw in Gladys a measured and low-key leader who didn’t lecture; she just delivered. And her ability to turn things around and plot a pathway to freedom for her state gave so many hope that she would lead the way for her lockdown-addicted fellow premiers to do the same.

Gladys Berejiklian has done a tremendous job leading NSW, writes Peta Credlin. Picture: Joel Carrett – Pool/Getty Images

Honestly it stinks. A fine Premier and a decent person is lost to her state over perceptions of improper influence regarding a couple of small grants to community organisations and because she got too close to someone who was unworthy of her.

I am not excusing illegal behaviour and more might come out – who knows? – but such is ICAC’s ability to drag your name through the mud without any finding of guilt, Berejiklian is now the third NSW Liberal premier it’s brought undone.

Yet across the Murray, another Premier faces no sanction despite politicising the police and the public service, using millions of taxpayer dollars for blatantly political purposes, and an ongoing litany of Covid failures. Yes, life is often unfair and politics often rewards the least deserving candidates. In this case the unfairness has removed a good leader in NSW and seemingly entrenched a really poor one in Victoria.

After hearing from a parade of ministers from Daniel Andrews down that they “didn’t know” or “couldn’t remember” who’d made the decision to employ dodgy private security – rather than the police and army as in every other state – to run hotel quarantine in Victoria, the Coate inquiry concluded that there had indeed been a “lack of proper leadership and oversight” but asserted that it was beyond the remit of the inquiry to say where the buck should have stopped for this “catastrophe waiting to happen”.

The inquiry failed to call key witnesses such as the head of the private security business in charge and failed to recall key witnesses such as the former health Minister Jenny Mikakos, even though she’d publicly disputed the Premier’s testimony, and asked to be recalled!

But that’s because the Coate Inquiry was never set up with the powers it needed to find the truth.

Last week, after its own 15-month investigation, WorkSafe Victoria is now perpetuating the Coate charade that the most disastrous decision in recent history was a “creeping assumption” that no individual person or people actually made. This is palpable nonsense designed to protect those responsible and to negate any meaningful accountability.

I worked inside government for more than 16 years; this is not how decisions are made, this is not how government works and I cannot believe any thinking person is asked to swallow it.

Not for a minute would the senior executives of a private company, whose unsafe work practices had led to 800 deaths, escape WorkSafe’s notice under the Andrews government’s industrial manslaughter laws but it seems that the health and safety watchdog only began its investigation after a formal complaint from Ken Phillips of Self-Employed Australia. Quite rightly, he now points out that “work safety breaches are indictable criminal offences. An ‘organisation’ cannot commit a criminal act. Only people do. Common sense would suggest that the department of health cannot commit criminal (safety) breaches. The people who control, direct and run the department commit the offences”.

Whatever mistakes Gladys Berejiklian might have made in her personal life, she’s at least ensured that her state’s management of the pandemic, after the initial catastrophic mishandling of the Ruby Princess, has been the country’s gold standard. Testing, tracing and vaccinating in NSW has been far superior to any other state.

The NSW hospital system was quickly ramped up to meet the Covid challenge, with ICU beds, in particular, surged from about 800 in normal times to over 1500 if needed. By contrast, in Victoria, Andrews personally promised to deliver an extra 4000 ICU beds in April last year; only to deny that he’d ever done so, despite $1.3 billion supposedly being spent. That’s why the NSW hospital system has coped so much better than in Victoria where hospitals are now in crisis as cases surge faster and higher than in NSW. To grasp the sheer brazen effrontery of Andrews, please watch the footage available on my Facebook page.

Daniel Andrews has not been accountable for his mistakes, writes Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

Yet he’s there and she’s gone. The lawyer in me finds it untenable that the NSW Premier is finished as a result of a mere investigation while the Victorian Premier remains untouchable despite presiding over disaster after disaster for which at least an arm of his government – if not yet any individual – now faces 58 serious charges and up to $96 million in fines (which taxpayers will be forced to cop).

Something is rotten in Victoria, and as we know, a fish rots from the head. As every Australian has discovered over the past 18 months, our leaders can be critical to every aspect of our lives, especially when we’re hit with an unanticipated crisis. Leadership matters. Personal quality counts. We’ve been locked up in our homes and locked out of vast swaths of our own country because that’s what Premiers have decreed, on the never-published advice of hitherto obscure health officials, under states of emergency that have largely suspended our usual democratic procedures.

One of the many reasons for a full national Royal Commission into this pandemic is the need to weigh the quality and effectiveness of our decision-making compared with that elsewhere, so that we learn the lessons for the future. On Monday, as Melbourne becomes the most locked-down city in the world, one thing’s for sure: if any leaders deserved to fall on their swords at this time, we have lost the wrong one.

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