Hotel quarantine inquiry must hold those who failed to account
For Victorians to have faith in a future quarantine program, hotel inquiry chair Jennifer Coate needs to find who knew what.
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Inquiry chair Jennifer Coate has broadly kept her powder dry in her interim report on Victoria’s botched hotel quarantine.
She’s saving the real criticism for her final report next month.
In her initial finding, handed down on Friday, the retired judge highlighted the late production of phone records and emails to the inquiry, noting “most regrettably, additional material has been provided’’ after the close of evidence in September.
“How and why this delay occurred will be addressed in the final report,” she wrote, adding further inquiries are being conducted.
This is a clear warning that she’s still trying to unpick who knew what about the decision to hire private security, and whether some witnesses failed to tell her the complete truth.
The interim report doesn’t spell out precisely why things went so badly wrong in Victoria’s quarantine program, apart from the use of subcontracted, poorly-trained security guards. The criticism is implied rather than trumpeted.
But the fact she’s made 69 recommendations on what a future program should look like shows the extent of the failures.
For example, she points out home quarantine would potentially be cheaper than the eye-watering $195m the four-month hotel program.
It would likely reduce the risk of people introducing COVID-19 into the community from overseas, and better for people’s mental and physical health.
For Victorians to have faith in a future quarantine program, Ms Coate must hold all those who failed so badly — individuals, departmental and agency chiefs, and their ministers — to account.
That includes Premier Daniel Andrews, who says he is ultimately responsible, and a raft of others who said they were not — former health minister Jenny Mikakos, former top bureaucrat Chris Eccles, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, DHHS secretary Kyme Peake and former police commissioner Graham Ashton.
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