Jenny Mikakos’ submission could spell the end for Daniel Andrews
Jenny Mikakos’ submission to the hotel quarantine inquiry is full of extraordinary claims, but the most damaging part isn’t even where she calls Daniel Andrews a liar, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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The most extraordinary thing about Jenny Mikakos’s submission to the hotel quarantine inquiry is not that she has invited it to call Daniel Andrews a liar — though she has.
It is the picture she paints of his government.
Make no mistake, if Jennifer Coate accepts her submission it will be curtains for Daniel Andrews.
The former health minister makes it clear she thinks the debacle that has killed almost 800 people, imprisoned millions of us in our homes for 22 hours a day and laid waste the state’s economy can be slated home to the Premier’s way of doing business.
“The haste with which this program was established saw the usual Cabinet processes subverted with the Premier, through the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) tasking the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions (DJPR) with the design implementation,” she contends.
In other words no one in the Government but Daniel Andrews can be blamed for fateful decisions to split responsibility for the program between two departments and to hire private security guards.
This was made worse by his decision shortly after the hotel quarantine program was established to deactivate Victoria’s system of cabinet government and replace it with a Crisis Committee of Cabinet, essentially an emergency committee of public safety for the course of the pandemic.
This had two disastrous consequences.
First, it changed the normal reporting lines between the state’s lead bureaucrats and their ministers, which in Mikakos’s case saw the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kym Peake, reporting directly to the Premier in her capacity as Mission Lead Secretary.
Peake was still theoretically reporting to the health minister, but in reality she was now answerable directly to Daniel Andrews.
This led to a failure of ordinary principles of departmental reporting and accountability.
The second disastrous consequence of Daniel Andrews’ decision to spontaneously reorganise the Victorian Government in the middle of a pandemic was the mothballing of the committee that had been set-up for the express purpose of handling such a crisis.
Mikakos points out had all existing cabinet committees not been suspended, the hotel quarantine program “might have come before the Security and Emergency Management Committee of Cabinet, described by the Emergency Management Manual Victoria (EMMV) as comprising a number of Ministers with emergency management responsibilities, which is attended by the Chief Commissioner of Police and the Emergency Management Commissioner in an advisory capacity, and chaired by the Premier.”
This committee is meant to provide direction and oversee the implementation of policies, strategies and programs affecting security, critical infrastructure resilience and emergency management.
“The fact that no such Cabinet, or Cabinet Committee, process was engaged for the setting up of the Hotel Quarantine Program is the root cause of some of the issues which have been ventilated before the Board in the course of this Inquiry,” Mikakos says.
As the former minister Adem Somyurek wrote recently in The Australian, it is no coincidence that “Victoria is the only state with a crisis cabinet and the only state with a crisis”.
Again no one else can be held responsible for this decision but Daniel Andrews.
But it needs to be understood that this decision to centralise power through the CCC was not an out-of-character decision by a premier faced with an unprecedented crisis but an extension of the way he has been running Victoria since 2014.
And Mikakos is clear it is Andrews (and/or his staff) who have been running things.
She has no truck with the suggestion that using private security was not really a decision, but was instead arrived at by way of creeping assumption, as counsel assisting the inquiry as argued.
“With respect, such a submission has insufficient regard to the realities of government operation and decision-making,” she says, inviting Coate “to treat with caution the Premier’s evidence where he sought to explain the reference to the private security … during his media conference” on the afternoon the program.
In other words, Mikakos is telling the lawyers running this inquiry they have shown they have no idea how Daniel Andrews operates and she is inviting them to get her back to explain it.
The smoke-signals from inside the inquiry is that this is not going to happen. It should. This might have started out as an inquiry into hotel quarantine but as witness after witness has misremembered conversations and meetings or tried to deny the plain meaning of words on the page in front of them, we have been afforded a glimpse of atmosphere and culture that rules this government.
After all the death and economic disaster that this culture has wrought on the people of Victoria it will not be good enough for this inquiry to confine itself to the history of hotel quarantine.
We have seen enough to know that there is much more we need to know.
Even Mikakos’s explanation for why not one government figure instructed their barrister to question ministers — despite all being lawyered-up — is a giant red warning something is very wrong in the state of Victoria: “a Minister in Cabinet government or a Secretary of a department might consider it politically disadvantageous or improper to cross-examine a Cabinet Minister.”
As one senior Labor figure reflected Friday morning: “He’s been running the show like this for years and then the pandemic came along and he got caught out.”
This inquiry needs to get Mikakos back. For a start. We owe it to the dead.
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