Health Minister Jenny Mikakos fronts hotel quarantine inquiry
The Health Minister has steered away from the “I don’t recall” line used by other ministers while being quizzed at the hotel quarantine inquiry. She’s instead found another way to shirk responsibility.
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They effectively boil down to this: s he wasn’t really in charge, and she wasn’t really told about problems.
Mikakos might not overtly say it, but this strategy aims to pass the buck to bureaucrats – or the collective government – in order to deflect responsibility.
The minister even crafted a grab for media that summed up this ploy.
The problem with the hotel quarantine scheme, she says, could be summed up by the adage “too many cooks spoil the broth”.
So many people were involved, you couldn’t distinguish who was in charge of what.
If you flip that around, it says that you can’t possibly single out a minister for the chop given how many people were involved.
Of course, even if someone mounted the argument that the health minister should be in charge of such a major plank of a pandemic response, Mikakos had an answer to that.
She was let down by key staff who didn’t pass on concerns.
Take the fact that governance issues raised by public health commanders in April weren’t passed on to the minister.
How could she be responsible if she simply didn’t know?
Likewise, Mikakos says she didn’t even know that security guards were in charge of monitoring guests until an outbreak of coronavirus at Rydges.
She says she thought authorised officers were controlling guests because they issue detention orders.
Evidence from Department of Jobs staff earlier in the inquiry showed there was barely a handful of authorised officers available during the first days of the scheme.
Sound plausible, that they could control thousands of returned travellers?
And wouldn’t health officials have trained security guards in infection control?
No, because DJPR had contracts for hotels and security.
Mikakos is playing a very different card to other key players in this farce, choosing not to overdo the “I don’t recall” line favoured by Department of Premier and Cabinet boss Chris Eccles.
Instead, Mikakos chose to cast herself as a bit player who wasn’t across details – and even that wasn’t her fault.
Mikakos said she was “absolutely certain” that concerns about the governance of hotel quarantine were not passed on to her in April.
But complaints about food that guests were receiving in hotels were passed on to her, even though that wasn’t her responsibility either.
Hotel meal matters were a matter for Jobs Minister Martin Pakula.
Remember, there was another minister involved in this scheme!
Perhaps bureaucrats didn’t pass on concerns about governance – the core operational structure of the bungled scheme – to Mikakos because she didn’t actually think that was her patch either.
You see, even though Department of Health secretary Kym Peake did nominate governance as a core role of DHHS, Mikakos disagrees.
She said the department was only in charge of the legal framework enabling the detention of returned travellers, and the health and wellbeing of those guests.
Governance may sound like bureaucratic mumbo jumbo but it’s fundamental to how these programs operate.
Denying governance was a DHHS responsibility is critical to the minister’s effort to shirk responsibility.
This was a multi-agency effort, Mikakos reminded counsel assisting the inquiry Ben Ihle.
Contracts for cleaning, security, and hotels were held by other departments.
In fact, Mikakos even took issue with the use of the phrase “control agency” for DHHS.
The problem with the “too many cooks” defence is that it could lead to people pointing their fingers at the head chef.
Using the minister’s metaphor that would be Premier Daniel Andrews – the one who ultimately decides her fate.
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