Patrick Carlyon: Christmas a gift for Andrews after a year of secrets and errors
Three damning inquiries will combine to condemn the Andrews government’s poorer choices through the pandemic — but the findings come at the perfect time.
Patrick Carlyon
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Premier Dan Andrews has received the best of Christmas presents.
Three damning inquiries, back to back, will combine to condemn his government’s poorer choices through the pandemic.
Yet they do so just before Christmas, when everyone is shopping, eating and thinking about other things.
A report by Ombudsman Deborah Glass this week offered a glimpse of draconian policy stripped of its much-claimed health imperatives.
On July 4, then acting chief health officer Annaliese van Diemen assumed a nine-towers lockdown in Flemington and North Melbourne, which would imprison 3000 people, would begin about 32 hours later.
Instead, she had 15 minutes to rubberstamp a decision – to lock down residents without warning - she didn’t believe to be necessary.
A parliamentary inquiry into the Black Lives Matter protest in June has heard now police chief commissioner Shane Patton explain that police allowed the gathering to proceed because the police feared events might turn nasty if they did not.
The greater good was subsumed to the preaching of a minority.
In a period steeped in police over-reach, when old women on park benches were harassed by police officers, a bigger threat to public safety was just, well, too hard.
On Monday, bigger findings await – the hotel quarantine inquiry headed by former judge Jennifer Coate.
The hearings have heard how 99 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Victoria’s second wave traced to the breaches.
That’s almost 800 dead because of an inexplicable government decision to use private security.
The inquiry has been hampered by the withholding of documents and reluctant testimony in the witness box.
A political tool, the inquiry was created not to find the truth, but to buy Andrews and his ministers time to dodge tricky questions.
Witnesses borrowed from The Castle. It was the vibe went the collective government response, in evidence that spoke of lemmings going over a cliff.
This wasn’t what happened. Osmosis was not to blame.
It is hoped the inquiry offers answers, or at least best guesses, and apportions blame where blame is merited.
Yet timing is everything. Inquiry findings on the eve of Christmas aid and abet a government steeped in secrecy and error.
Mr Andrews hasn’t orchestrated the timing. Instead he has been presented with a Christmas gift that comes at the expense of the public his government is supposed to serve.
It’s another unfortunate symbol of a government that has never cared to explain how or why it restricted freedoms like no government in Australia has before.
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