Victoria is a shambles and will not get better until Andrews is ejected
The inquiry into Victoria’s lethal hotel quarantine scheme has been lacklustre at best, writes Piers Akerman, and citizens of that state need to ask if they are getting either the truth or their money’s worth.
Opinion
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Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ claim that his brutal lockdown of Melbourne is based on health advice is nonsense.
His rapid backdown over opening up yesterday’s Cox Plate to 500 punters and connections proved beyond all doubt that politics, not best practice, is driving his mania to punish Victorians under the guise of health security.
Those Victorians who fatuously bleat their support for their Premier from the anonymity of a hashtag #standwithdan expose nothing beyond their ignorant bias.
The current death toll in their beleaguered state due to the coronavirus is close to 820, almost all attributable to the lethal failure of Andrews’ government’s Mickey Mouse hotel quarantine program.
How many of those who #stand withdan would be as happy to #stand withairtraffic if an air traffic controller was responsible for causing a collision between two Boeing 747-400s and killing about the same number of people?
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For more than 100 days now, the evidence of a totally flawed government, a compromised bureaucracy and a completely discredited code of governance has been on display.
The abysmal performance of the Victorian inquiry into the state’s lethal hotel quarantine scheme heard by a board of one, Jennifer Coate, highlights the pressing need for an inquiry into the conduct of Victorian government inquiries.
It has been lacklustre at best.
After a series of appointments as Victorian coroner and magistrate and president of the Children’s Court, Coate was elevated to the Family Court in January, 2013, in one of the last acts of federal Labor Attorney-General Nicola Roxon and was immediately released to serve on the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, where her performance as one of six commissioners went almost unnoticed.
Had not my friend and Sunday Telegraph colleague Peta Credlin not pressed Andrews for the release of phone records which shed light on contacts between state and federal bureaucrats on the very day the use of the ADF and private security guards was agreed to by the laughable national cabinet, there is nothing to suggest that the Coate Inquiry would have gone beyond its nonsensical view that something called “shared responsibility” absolved individual ministers and the Premier from blame for the failure.
Now, armed with the records, but not the content of the calls, Andrews and former health minister Jenny Mikakos (who has already flagged concerns with Andrews’ previous evidence) need to be recalled.
So too do the former Premier’s Department head Chris Eccles, who speedily exited when it was shown he’d fortuitously forgotten the crucial phone call that forced him to fall on his sword.
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Former police commissioner Graham Ashton needs to be brought back, as does Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp, who initially claimed he regularly briefed his police minister Lisa Neville — until she said in evidence that he didn’t during the critical time period, causing him to disremember his earlier recall and recant.
The #standwithdans can’t be too dumb to contemplate the bizarre attempt by Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton to instruct his department to withhold emails from the inquiry which showed he had been made aware of the plan to use private security at the quarantine hotels as early as March after he had repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know in May.
Why hasn’t Andrews’ chief of staff Lissie Ratcliff been called to give evidence and provide her phone records, and who actually signed the contract for the duds?
The Victorian health department continues to fail in its mission with contact tracing and the closure of schools because it had separate case managers for every member of a large family and, in the chaos that ensued, the crossed-lines of communication ensured that a Year 5 student from the family attended East Preston Islamic College for two days in the belief that he had been cleared.
Compare the manner in which the NSW ICAC has been putting politicians through the wringer and ask yourself whether Victorians are getting either the truth or their money’s worth.
Until the Andrews government goes, all Victorian inquiries will be considered suspect, no matter how well credentialed they may be.
Coronavirus fragments and the last traces of integrity and transparency have been flushed into the sewers of Melbourne.