Victoria virus crisis a symptom of incompetent Labor government
The Andrews Government’s abject ineptitude in dealing with hotel quarantine is just the latest in a train of catastrophes that should have seen it run out of office, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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We are being asked to be forgiving of Victorians as the state’s failure to manage its coronavirus sufferers drags the nation backwards into the slough of economic collapse.
Just as we don’t blame all Chinese for the international thuggery of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party.
Yet Victorians did vote for Daniel Andrews’ union-controlled ALP and the polls have been extraordinarily kind to this absolutely incompetent politician despite serial and extremely public failures.
The Andrews government’s abject ineptitude in dealing with hotel quarantine is just the latest in a train of catastrophes which should have seen a thoughtful public run it out of office at the last election and investigate numerous senior ministers’ devastating ineptitude.
This is a government which allowed its police force to breach the most basic principle of the legal system — lawyer-client confidentiality — and pay Lawyer X to inform on those who were relying on her to represent them.
The government spent millions trying to hide this scandal from the taxpayers.
This is also the government whose police force was involved in the attempt to prosecute the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in the nation, Cardinal George Pell, despite there being not enough evidence and the collapse of a string of equally false charges that the police endeavoured to bring against him. Another case of the government spending millions only to have the High Court issue a scathing judgment of the decision of the Victorian Appeal Court which includes some of the most senior members of the Victorian bench.
Then there was the case of the red-shirts debacle when the Andrews government directed electorate officials to publicly campaign for the Labor Party.
Public servants are not meant to be used for political work and ombudsman Deborah Glass found in 2018 that Labor had misused $388,000 of public money through the arrangement. She did not recommend criminal charges be laid but the Labor Party did repay the money though it could not, of course, unwind the criminal activity.
Add Andrews’ tacit support for the outrageous Black Lives Matter march in breach of social distancing and it becomes increasingly difficult to feel much sympathy for those who constantly voted for the Andrews government in the certain knowledge that it was, at the very least, incompetent.
At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic we were treated to an insight into how the Victorian public service under this government has permitted ideology to supersede ability when the state’s Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen posted a tweet likening the impact of the arrival of Captain Cook to COVID-19.
Not only did Ms van Diemen display the appalling ignorance now expected of the woke brigades (Captain Cook had died before the First Fleet reached Australia and was not the prime instigator of the colonisation of the continent) but she was not rebuked, just counselled about the risks of social media use for posting her stupid remark.
Before the current explosion of coronavirus victims at the housing commission blocks and the Islamic Al-Taqwa College, the biggest cluster was at the Cedar Meats abattoir.
The Victorian government refused to identify the site (its owners include major Labor Party donors) until the numbers of infected were just too high to ignore.
Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton admitted that in hindsight the abattoir should have been closed sooner rather than waiting for more cases.
The question of where the current infection got its toehold — the high-rises or the college — is moot. The infection seems to have erupted after the hotel-quarantining program inevitably failed and then there was apparently a family gathering from which it spread into the tower blocks and the college.
The Victorian government has launched an inquiry with limited powers of investigation into the guard failure and is using this process to hide from further scrutiny. The federal government has launched a wider inquiry into hotel quarantining nationally but whether it gets into the weeds of the Victorian problem remains to be seen.
Ideology and incompetence are a recipe for catastrophe. Victorians won’t get a chance to dump Andrews and his failing government until November 2022. The nation, let alone the Victorians, deserves far better.