New uncovered video exposes who’s behind Victoria’s botched hotel security saga

For weeks, Victoria has been trying to get to the bottom of who was behind the hotel quarantine fiasco that has led to the current pandemic disaster. Now the culprits seem to have become increasingly clear, writes James Campbell.

For weeks, we have been trying to get to the bottom of who was behind the hotel quarantine fiasco that has led to the present disaster.

And for weeks there have been leaks and counter-leaks as bureaucrats and their political bosses try to make sure the blame lands on someone else.

Now we seem to have more of a picture.

Management of the program was the responsibility of the Department of Jobs, Precincts and the Regions, with Global Victoria playing a key role under the leadership of its chipper chief executive Gonul Serbest.

We know this because she took time out from her busy schedule to appear in a little film boasting about what an “extremely rewarding project it had been to work on”.

She and her colleagues had “been thinking about this as one massive inbound super trade mission”, she revealed.

CEO of Global Victoria Gonul Serbest in a video produced by Global Victoria celebrating the success of the now botched hotel quarantine system

You couldn’t make this up.

It’s like something from the Rob Sitch comedy Utopia.

Except it wasn’t utopia it was a dystopia: even as the Serbest and her staff were talking themselves up on camera the virus was leaking out into the community via the $22-an-hour security guards who had been hired to protect us.

So is this case closed?

Well, yes, in the sense that it will be pretty hard going forward to claim that DJPR’s role was confined to procurement.

But it actually raises more questions than it answers, starting with who the hell thought it was a good idea to give the quarantine program to people who have no experience of quarantine.

I mean, is it really a great shock that if you give a job to people who run inbound super trade missions for a living they’re going to treat it less like a public health crisis and more like — I don’t know — an inbound super trade mission?

The Stamford Plaza hotel in Little Collins St was used to quarantine returned travellers. Picture Jay Town

The most obvious explanation for why it ended on Global Victoria’s plate would seem to be that in the middle of a global pandemic there were not going to be any trade missions going in or out of anywhere, so it made sense to make use of Serbest’s under-utilised team.

Clearly a disastrous decision in retrospect and one we will be living with for years.

But it doesn’t answer the bigger question of why it ended up on the plate of DJPR in the first place.

Why wasn’t it put under the control of the Department of Justice or Emergency Management Victoria?

Why weren’t health bureaucrats at the centre of the program?

Where were the cops and the Australian Defence Force

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