Peta Credlin: Melburnians won’t forget Daniel Andrews caused lockdown hell
The Premier has had months to fix Victoria’s broken contact-tracing system and the fact it still isn’t says everything about this government’s ongoing incompetence. They need to be held accountable or Victoria’s prospects will never improve.
Opinion
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The fact that a new COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne’s northern suburbs put at risk Sunday’s expected relaxation of the virtual house arrest people have been under for months, tells you everything you need to know about how Victoria got into this mess in the first place despite the longest and toughest lockdowns in the world.
Premier Daniel Andrews has had months to fix Victoria’s broken contact-tracing system that’s still run using spreadsheets, fax machines and bits of paper — and the fact it isn’t is why NSW and Queensland can cope with outbreaks and stay open, while Victoria’s response is more lockdowns.
Not opening will be devastating for Melburnians, it will also damage the Premier’s cunning political plan to use easing of restrictions to trigger mass amnesia about how people got there in the first place.
But people aren’t stupid. They understand the Premier’s decision to go it alone and use private security guards, instead of police and defence force personnel, caused the state’s second-wave outbreak — and they want answers as to how it happened and why.
Just have a look at the rest of the country which is all but back to living some sort of COVID normal and you can see how devastating the Premier’s decisions back in March have been for Victorians – over 800 lives lost, businesses that are on their knees, statewide economic pain and countless more suffering serious mental-health effects from decisions that fail all tests of government competence, probity and procurement.
The Premier’s plan was that gratitude at their release would trump the anger of Melbourne residents over their needless imprisonment.
But if we want the best-possible government — and surely everyone does — it’s vital that the truth emerges about the escape of this deadly virus from the quarantine hotels where it should have been safely locked up.
And that’s why it’s crucial that the Coate Inquiry doesn’t end up the whitewash that the Premier so clearly always intended it to be.
It was only three weeks ago that the closing submission from counsel assisting the inquiry was running the line that no one was really to blame for Victoria’s decision to reject National Cabinet’s recommendation to set up hotel quarantine using police and the ADF.
Instead, we were told, the use of some very shady private security contractors was just a “creeping assumption”; a fateful decision for Victoria to go it alone that had somehow emerged from nowhere and had been pushed by no one.
Stop. Government doesn’t work like that, even in an emergency, and particularly when we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars; indeed, if you follow the money (and the individuals connected) that’s where you’ll find it just gets more and more interesting.
The Inquiry should have recalled Jenny Mikakos when she resigned two days before the closing submissions, saying she “strongly disagreed” with the Premier’s sworn testimony.
But it didn’t. And as that week progressed, and I found more and more witnesses who should have been called but were not, I came to the very sorry view that Coate was well on her way to writing up a report with very little relevance to what really happened to help cause the deaths of over 800 Victorians.
That’s when I decided I had to go to the Premier’s 99th daily media conference and press him on questions that the inquiry had not asked.
It wasn’t just about the infamous six minutes and the missing incoming call logs for former police chief Graham Ashton. As soon as I understood Ashton’s evidence only had his outgoing calls, I quickly realised he was the only witness with even partial phone records on the table.
Where was the Premier, his office, departmental chiefs, ministers and countless others?
Not only weren’t their phone records provided but for most they weren’t even sought. In the end it was only public pressure that forced the hand of the Coate Inquiry to do what it should have done months earlier; and once the phone records were released, the Premier’s top official, Secretary of Premier and Cabinet Chris Eccles resigned overnight.
Other witnesses were not called: like David Millward, the owner of Unified Security which picked up a $30m contract for three months’ work in under six hours, despite not even being on the official list of approved security contractors.
This was just the sort of red flag the Victorian government’s own procurement watchdog warned about when it wrote to all departments three days prior to this special deal and said “in usual times like this, it is important to acknowledge an increased risk of unscrupulous or ill-prepared suppliers”, and “please be vigilant about the use of suppliers, in particular new suppliers”.
This independent watchdog, the Victorian Government Purchasing Board, hasn’t provided any evidence to the Coate Inquiry even though it sent letters throughout the year raising serious probity concerns with ministers and officials about use of private security contracts in hotel quarantine.
It was particularly concerned that the Jobs Department was running these contracts, yet it was (and still is) the only major department that hadn’t set up an independent procurement unit by the deadline of January 2019.
This matters because it is meant to ensure that mates and cronies don’t get taxpayer money; yet to date, Coate has not pursued these serious questions.
When I asked the Premier about this at his press conference, he couldn’t tell me about the letters, he couldn’t tell me about the missing evidence from the VGPB or why they haven’t been called by Coate, nor could he explain why the Jobs Department was 18 months late meeting probity requirements yet were still put in charge of running his government’s COVID procurement.
There are even contracts granted, without a tender, connected to family members in the Premier’s own office, plus outfits like Unified that are operated by individuals who have twice before gone into administration owing creditors millions. And I promise you, this is all just the tip of the iceberg.
Belatedly, last week, the inquiry held what it termed an “extraordinary” hearing where counsel assisting tabled further emails from Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton which suggested not only that his testimony had been incomplete and misleading but that he’d even instructed his lawyers (paid for by taxpayers) to specifically withhold information.
The inquiry is now seeking further evidence, via affidavit, from Professor Sutton and others.
I am disturbed that rather than get witnesses back in the box and to probe them properly, it is just requiring further information by way of affidavit — which is weak.
For those who are not lawyers, my fundamental problem with this latest move is that affidavits are simply statements that clever lawyers write for their clients.
Sure, the client has to swear the statement is true and sign it but it’s a very different proposition to facing tough questions in the witness box.
If more than 800 people had not died and if billions of dollars of damage and lasting mental pain had not been inflicted as a result of decisions made back in March, all this might seem like crying over spilt milk.
But if mistakes are not examined, they will never be corrected; and if government is not held accountable, it will never be improved.
With the parliament hardly sitting and with the Labor Party put into administration, the Coate Inquiry is virtually the only accountability mechanism left for the people of Victoria.
For much of the past 12 hours, the Premier will have been caught between a rock and a hard place — fearing more outbreaks if he opens up and still unsure about the capability of his second-rate contact tracing system, but also knowing that easing restrictions is the only way to wind back the daily media conferences which, given the limited parliamentary scrutiny, have become the main means of keeping him honest.
His original plan — that Coate would wash this all away with a “creeping assumption”, that once restrictions eased people would forget the past six months of hell and that by throwing around enough borrowed cash to anaesthetise the economic pain of the lockdown, all might be forgotten — is in tatters.
Victoria is the only state to reject the National Cabinet decision and went it alone on hotel quarantine security, and it remains the only state in lockdown this morning.
The fact that the Premier still has doubts about a contact tracing system that should have been remedied months ago says everything about this government’s ongoing incompetence.
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