Peta Credlin: Latest lockdown proves Victorian government is not up to the job

Dan Andrews claims Victoria’s hotel quarantine is “gold standard”, but it looks more like fool’s gold for fed up Victorians.

Six and a half million Victorians are locked up in their homes yet again, businesses hit with multimillion-dollar losses for a week of lost trade, and borders are again slamming shut right around the country, all because the Andrews government is brilliant at spin and boasting, but simply incapable of doing its job.

The Premier can’t help himself. At the start of last week, at successive media conferences, he insisted that Victoria’s hotel quarantine and contact tracing systems were “gold standard”.

They were so good, he reckoned, that all the other states were “copying what we’ve been doing”.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews addresses the media with a COVID-19 update on Saturday. Picture: Paul Jeffers/NewsWire

By the end of the week, though, his hotel quarantine system had again failed to keep Victorians safe, his contract tracing teams were overwhelmed, and a stage four lockdown was back in place.

No gold standard here, more like fool’s gold from someone who’d be sacked by now if he was running a company like he’s running the state.

It all started, we were told, because a man at the Holiday Inn used a nebuliser for his chronic asthma against the rules. But that man has since gone public and said he was given permission to use it, again highlighting the Premier’s willingness to blame others rather than take any personal responsibility for the government’s repeated failure to fix Victoria’s broken hotel quarantine model or the contract tracing system that’s meant to be our last line of defence if the virus manages to get out, as it has.

Anyone who’s had experience with Victoria’s tracing system will tell you it’s sub-standard. There’s still no uniform, statewide QR code to support tracing efforts, unlike
NSW, which runs a centralised, government-badged QR code system with a database that links cases almost routinely.

What’s worse, Victorian officials have been forced to admit delays of up to 48 hours in tracing the immediate contacts of hotel workers.

That’s meant that an infected family member worked a long shift at a Melbourne airport cafe while 3500 domestic travellers were passing through the terminal.

We never stood a chance, did we Melbourne? Especially when the Premier made a captain’s call to let thousands of tennis stars and their hangers-on pour back into a quarantine system that’s still no better than last year’s shambolic set-up which led to 800 deaths and one of the world’s harshest four-month lockdowns for 5 million Melburnians.

Yet if you swallow the Premier’s spin, this latest outbreak has nothing to do with ineptly run quarantine and woefully inadequate contact tracing. It’s all the fault of the “lightning speed” UK variant of the virus — but if that’s the case, how has NSW managed to deal with this variant, yet Victoria is back in lockdown — especially given NSW has taken in 124,893 people through its quarantine system and Victoria only 35,666?

Why have tennis stars been allowed to fly into the country for the Australian Open? Picture: David Gray/AFP

It’s telling that while announcing Victorians would be locked up for just five days, the health directions actually extend for 14 days. No wonder the reaction has been “we can’t keep living like this” and businesses who have lost millions are rightly demanding financial compensation from the government.

Sadly, this is the stop-start life that is “COVID normal”, more or less forever, as long as we have trigger-happy Premiers, incompetent state governments that can’t keep a virus inside quarantine hotels, and vaccines that might reduce symptoms but don’t stop infection.

On top of Melbourne’s 112-day lockdown last year, we’ve had Brisbane locked down for three days in early January after just one case; Adelaide locked down for six days last November after 22 cases; and Perth locked down for a week, a fortnight back, after just one case.

Even NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian locked down the northern beaches of Sydney for nearly three weeks just before Christmas after 38 cases.

All of these lockdowns are thought to be the result of failures in the hotel quarantine system, yet still we’re importing the virus day after day with every planeload of returning travellers, Hollywood movie stars and sporting teams — and we still insist on the madness of housing them in the middle of our busiest cities.

This can’t go on.

If nothing else, this week the Prime Minister should step in and offer the premiers a choice to relocate quarantine to remote locations (like disused mining camps) where travellers and the staff they might infect are effectively in isolation together.

Or even tell Andrews, given he’s now failed three times, that Victoria is banned from the hotel quarantine system and should be paying NSW to look after returning residents.

It’s a pity it’s come to this, given states demanded to run quarantine their way in the first place, but what’s the point of having a national government if it can’t save us from incompetent states?

And the price for states being relieved of their quarantine burden should be a federal royal commission into the whole pandemic so we finally know the truth about what’s gone wrong and who’s to blame because this sadly won’t be the last crisis we face.