Peta Credlin: Incompetent Victoria gets Covid lockdown wrong again

Victorians are enduring yet another lockdown, caused not by the Covid pandemic, but the Andrews government’s inadequate response.

Spare a thought for the people of Victoria as we enter our fourth lockdown – caused not by Covid but by the state government’s incompetent response to it.

The Andrews government gets it wrong again and again, in ways no other state has. And instead of apologising, and trying to make amends, it insists each disaster is someone else’s fault.

Any half-competent government would have learned the lessons from last year’s four-month lockdown of Melbourne and 800 deaths but not Victoria.

Last week, it couldn’t even name the right supermarket as an exposure site. People waited up to five hours for testing, with one key site closing 20 minutes after it opened because it had reached capacity.

It urged people to ring the Covid hotline, only to have it crash because no one had thought to ramp up staff to take the extra calls.

It boasted its hotel quarantine was the gold standard, even though it turns out the now stood-down official in charge wasn’t just breaking his own rules but hiring his gym mates on $100,000 salaries.

It insists the QR system has finally been fixed and standardised, even though the Victorian parliament itself isn’t using it. In the midst of the worst crisis in decades, the Premier has been on sick leave for months.

So has the Police Minister, who is supposedly in charge of hotel quarantine. Victoria – you get the government you elect.

* Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm