James Campbell: Sutton quickly learns inquiry is no friendly press conference
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has won the hearts of many Victorians for his candid approach to the daily virus press conferences. But he didn’t have the same effect at the hotel quarantine inquiry, writes James Campbell.
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The best you can say for Brett Sutton’s morning at the hotel quarantine inquiry is it was better than Andrew Crisp’s day on Tuesday.
Professor Sutton’s easy confidence at the daily pandemic press conference has helped to make him something of a pin-up among a certain demographic.
The Sutton of the inquiry was a different beast.
As it slowly dawned on him the questions from counsel assisting the inquiry, Ben Ihle, were far from friendly ones he became a little defensive – even tetchy. Ilhe wanted to know about the powers the Chief Health Officer has under the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act, which are, to put it bluntly, extensive.
He could apparently order people to provide contact information and health details, order their testing, decontaminate them and forcibly detain them for quarantine. Had he considered using these powers? The answer was yes, but not really. Why not? I’m sorry to have to disappoint CHO fans but their hero’s answer was not convincing.
The Act, he said, has always been applied to individuals rather than classes of persons, that is to say “individuals arriving, and with regard to the assessment of those individuals and their risk to the community” and “the orders and the powers that apply in those orders … are really for the purpose of managing that individual who might be a risk by virtue of having a listed human disease, or being suspected of having that listed human disease, and is not historically, and as far as I know in any other jurisdiction in Australia, applied to a class of persons more broadly”.
This made no sense for several reasons.
Firstly, because in this case every person arriving was indeed suspected of having a listed human disease – just as the act envisaged. But more importantly because the same concern about applying the law to “a class of persons” could be said to apply equally to the state legislation that Sutton ended up using instead under which 20,000 detention orders were signed by his deputy Dr Annaliese Van Diemen.
What Ilhe wanted to know, I suspect, was not why Sutton had not exercised his powers under the Commonwealth legislation to compel people to be tested but why had he not compelled them at all. Because the powers under the state legislation were almost identical.
Next we had the bizarre admission that although he had been unhappy that he had not been designated State Controller during the pandemic Dr Sutton had not actually raised it directly with the Secretary of the DHHS. Nor did he raise it with the Health Minister Jenny Mikakos.
Think about that. During this period Sutton was appearing almost daily in public alongside her. Were they actually talking to each other – or is their relationship strictly on-stage-only like Simon and Garfunkel’s?
Finally, it was another day at the inquiry, another offer of ADF help from the Federal Government ignored. This time the offer was from the Professor Brendan Murphy in an email to Sutton. The CHO hadn’t even passed that one on, instead leaving it to Dr Van Diemen.
The question many people watching his testimony will be wondering is ‘was he passed over as State Controller because the Government felt he wasn’t up to it?’
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