Andrew Bolt: ‘Tough guy’ Dan is just a sham

Dan Andrews wants Victorian to think he’s “tough” on COVID, but when it comes to measures that truly keep the community safe he’s weak.

If Premier Daniel Andrews is so good at fighting the coronavirus, why is Victoria so bad?

Shouldn’t voters judge this premier not on his A-grade spin but D-grade performance?

Andrews is popular for being the toughest premier, yet is the least effective.

No other state has had so many lockdowns — three now — or had its citizens locked down for so many months.

No other state has had so many deaths — 820, or 90 per cent of all coronavirus deaths in this country.

No other state has had the coronavirus escape so often from its quarantine hotels. Two escapes last year cost more than 800 lives, and now the virus has escaped again.

No other state has had a quarantine system so bad guards last year were mostly untrained, often hired through Gumtree, and some with religious objections to alcohol-based sanitisers.

No other state has so little trust in its quarantine hotels that even today — after a devastating inquiry — it bans Australians overseas from flying home.

No other state has a contract tracing system that was widely panned by experts last year as Australia’s worst.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Paul Jeffers

And no other state has a premier who looks at all this and boasts that he’s the best.

Andrews is proof that if you look tough and confident, most voters will judge you on how you look and not what you achieved.

But surely his boast last week of having a “gold standard” hotel quarantine system — the “leading” one — was finally too much even for #IStandWithDan fanatics.

“We have a system that is worthy of being copied by others,” said Andrews, just before we learnt that — uh oh — the virus had again escaped and infected 16 more people.

Here is another Andrews’ boast last week: “Right now, we are reaching close contacts well within the 48-hour benchmark.”

But federal authorities said Andrews’ contact tracers had initially failed to find and warn half the close contacts of the infected people last week within that 48 hours.

Who still believes this man’s spin? There he was last weekend in his familiar role of blaming everyone except himself.

This latest outbreak, he claimed, was caused by an infected traveller in quarantine who broke the rules by using a nebuliser, helping to spread the virus further: “Those machines are not allowed, that was clearly communicated.”

But then the traveller told reporters he’d twice been told by quarantine hotel workers he could use the nebuliser for his asthma. They’d even offered to get him more Ventolin.

Then there’s the fraud of this whole strategy of being “tough”.

Yes, please be tough, Premier, but only with what works.

Be tough — much tougher — with quarantine hotels, because that is almost the only entry the virus has into our community.

And put those quarantine facilities outside Melbourne — why are quarantine hotels inside all our capital cities? — so that a breakout can be contained without having to lock down millions of people.

Melbourne CBD is once again deserted. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Paul Jeffers

Be as tough on contact tracing as NSW, which has managed outbreaks as big as Melbourne’s without shutting Sydney, locking up its residents and ruining businesses.

But don’t be “tough” with bans that make next to zero difference.

Why is the whole of Victoria in lockdown when the only people infected so far have been people from the quarantine hotels, family and friends who either lived with or dined with them at a family event — people now in isolation?

These are all Melburnians the contact tracers could find and isolate. It seems they can handle this, after all.

Yet people even out in the Wimmera, on the Murray, in the Victorian Alps and in tiny country towns must now stay in their homes to save them from a virus far, far away.

But again we get the spin. Tough is good.

This lockdown, says Andrews, is “a short, sharp blast — the same as we’ve seen in Queensland and WA” — a lockdown West Australian Premier Mark McGowan recommended: “Lockdowns are tough. But as we’ve seen, they work.”

Rubbish. The lockdowns this year of Brisbane and Perth showed no such thing.

Those cities were locked down after one infected person in each case had already been found and isolated before they could pass on the virus.

Those lockdowns saved no one, but hurt millions.

But how many Australians confuse this “toughness” with competence?

Yes, Andrews is “tough”, but pointlessly, ruinously tough. When it comes to the basics, he’s incompetent.

He should resign. How much more can Victorians take?