Andrew Bolt: Victoria’s COVID rules only for little people

It says a lot about Victoria’s ramshackle quarantine system that not even the boss of infection control could stick to the rules, which only seem to apply to little people.

Is it any wonder Victoria’s quarantine system is a disaster. Picture: Ian Currie

Matiu Bush is so woke that he asks us to refer to him by his preferred non-binary pronoun: “they”.

Sure. So: they is a walking example of just why Victoria has had the most ramshackle quarantine system, under an equally woke and clueless government.

Bush has now been suspended as head of the state’s infection prevention branch after The Australian revealed that he — sorry, they — was reported twice this year for breaking the rules at Victoria’s quarantine hotels.

In the first incident, Bush failed to change his face mask after going for coffee. He — they — also refused to sign in with his personal QR code, and failed to use the hand sanitiser.

In the second, he was leaving the Intercontinental Hotel when an army corporal twice told him he first had to get a virus test.

Matiu Bush pulled rank on an army corporal who tried to enforce the rules.

Both times Bush said he was the boss and “I override that protocol”, according to an incident report.

The rules, it seems, are for little people. What a metaphor for a state that treated Victorians like prisoners during the panic.

I don’t want to be too hard on Bush. He did get tested somewhere else, and he’s done a lot of community work.

But it says a lot that not even the boss of infection control could stick to Victoria’s rules.

So why are we surprised that many hotel quarantine staff did not, either, and that 800 Victorians died last year when the virus escaped?

Even now, these operational incidents reviews that dobbed in Bush reveal that unvaccinated contractors have been doing maintenance at the hotels in breach of government policy.

But the Andrews government’s reaction to this embarrassment is also damning.

Back when Bush broke the rules he was officially “counselled”.

It’s only now that The Australian has made this public that he’s been suspended pending an investigation.

This government confesses only to what we know already.

There’s another example of this tell-’em-nothing style in these incident reports.

Publicly, Premier Daniel Andrews blamed the Holiday Inn outbreak that shut down Melbourne on a returned traveller who’d used a nebuliser, against the rules.

But not only did this man insist he’d been allowed the nebuliser, these incident reports now reveal the real cause of the outbreak was staff swabbing an infected woman while standing in a hallway.

When were we going to be told?