Peta Credlin: Victoria will drag every state into COVID-19 crisis
There’s a very real chance that Victoria’s coronavirus outbreak will not be able to be contained — and it will bring down every other state because of the “sheer utter incompetence” of Premier Daniel Andrews, Peta Credlin writes.
Opinion
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The Prime Minister said last week that “we’re all Melburnians”. Well, thank god you’re not. I’m here at the moment and it’s a plague-ridden city in a basket case state led by a man who is a lethal mix of political rat cunning, PR spin, unwarranted self-belief and sheer utter incompetence.
Even then, he stands head and shoulders above the ‘brains trust’ of his ministry, most of whom would find running a bingo night a challenge, let alone managing the complex work across multiple government agencies and departments that’s needed to beat this pandemic.
Of Friday’s 288 new infections in Victoria (the highest single day tally for any Australian state at any time in this pandemic), health authorities had no idea where more than 90 per cent of them came from.
It was much the same story again on Saturday, with another 216 new cases reported. Given the reality of more than 1300 new infections over the past fortnight, nearly all of them community transmission, this disease now looks perilously close to being out-of-control — and if it’s out-of-control in one state, it won’t be easy to keep it contained in the rest of the country.
And that’s before we even factor in the economic damage of this second lockdown given Victoria accounted for 40 per cent of Australia’s economic growth last year.
No other state has tried to manage COVID-19 like Victoria, and no other state has been hit as hard.
For all their clever attempts at media management, there’s just no hiding from the numbers that expose the Andrews Government lie that this second wave outbreak is the result of families getting ‘complacent’, as the Premier bellowed on Tuesday.
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Once Australia had shut its national borders and then sent every returning traveller into hotel quarantine, the disease was well on its way to being contained in the general community with statistics showing that from late April to late June, new cases were rarely more than 20 a day, almost all among returned travellers.
If I was back advising politicians, putting the greatest effort into managing the jumbo jets of likely infections coming home would have been my priority. Particularly after NSW’s Ruby Princess debacle, checking and rechecking procedures for managing returning travellers should have been a no-brainer. In other states, it was; not so in Victoria.
Where other jurisdictions used ‘uniforms’ — police or army personnel — to run hotel quarantine, Daniel Andrews handed it to his Jobs Minister, who then handed it to the private security industry, which is connected to his own union.
Jobs Minister, Martin Pakula, then spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on contracts with these security firms that did not go through the usual tender processes.
We all know the allegations now — firms paid for staff that were never rostered on, guards trading sex with travellers for being let out of quarantine, chronic lack of training and more.
But don’t let this bad behaviour absolve others from their responsibilities — I know government, so where were the audits from health officials, where were the spot checks from police and contact tracing teams once the early signs of outbreaks among security guards emerged? Who was warned and when? Why were so many in quarantine allowed to refuse COVID tests?
Is it any wonder the Premier wants all questions shunted off to his inquiry that won’t report for months and is as toothless as any I’ve ever seen given it doesn’t have the power to compel documents or witnesses making it little more than a sham?
The Premier has admitted that contact tracing is now his biggest challenge and that more help is needed, so why then is he now using call centre operators rather than the Australian Defence Force, the best logistical experts I know?
It was revealed last week that Victoria did not follow the national guidelines for tracing and yet even though the PM continues to offer the ADF, the Premier continues to refuse.
I bet this would be the Opposition’s first question to Andrews if parliament was sitting, but it’s barely sat since March with Labor even using its casting vote on Monday to kill off a parliamentary inquiry into the crisis.
The centralisation of power in the state of Victoria is truly disturbing.
Early in the crisis, the Premier circumvented normal cabinet processes by swearing in an eight person corona cabinet.
He’s used the recent branch-stacking scandal to put the Victorian Labor Party into administration, disenfranchising every one of its 14,000 members, reducing accountability and making him even more powerful.
The public service and key agencies like the police have been more-than-usually politicised so there’s little “frank and fearless” advice there either.
If Daniel Andrews was a company director, he’d be sacked by now and facing the regulators, and the courts. Yet in Victoria, with fixed terms, he has until the next election due in November 2022 before he faces those that ‘regulate’ him.
It’s instructive that when a federal Minister, Dan Tehan, earlier accused Andrews of a “failure of leadership” for not reopening schools when the health advice was that it was more than safe to do so, the Prime Minister instructed him to withdraw and apologise.
On Friday, announcing an inquiry into hotel quarantine, Scott Morrison specified that it was to consider how well this had been done right across the country — even though the only place where border protection measures have failed has been Victoria.
If this is a fair dinkum inquiry, the PM will give Jane Halton (who is running it) all the powers she needs to do it properly, including the powers not granted in Victoria in terms of access to documents and witnesses.
This coronavirus crisis is costing hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer welfare and more in terms of economic activity, so just like we’re demanding a full and proper global inquiry into COVID-19, we must have a transparent one here in Australia.
There’s a very real chance that Victoria’s outbreak will not be able to be contained. And it will drag every other state backwards, and the country too.
This isn’t just a Melbourne concern anymore, it’s now a national emergency.