Rita Panahi: Forgetful Crisp adds insult to injury for Victorians
As if amnesiac bureaucrats weren't enough, Andrew Crisp retracting what little evidence he gave at the hotel inquiry is the cherry on top of a useless and deeply troubling situation, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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Victoria’s new status as the country’s laughing stock was reconfirmed this week when the state’s top emergency chief retrospectively forgot vital communication he thought he had with the Police Minister.
Confused? Aren’t we all?
If it wasn’t bad enough that the Premier, three ministers and every highly paid bureaucrat that appeared at the hotel quarantine inquiry suffered from selective amnesia, now we have Emergency Management Victoria Commissioner Andrew Crisp claiming that evidence he gave at a parliamentary hearing about briefing Lisa Neville was little more than a figment of his imagination.
Crisp had told the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee that he had regularly briefed the police Minister on March 27 and 28 as the state prepared to launch its hopelessly botched hotel quarantine program on March 29.
But in a letter published on the PAEC website, conveniently on budget day, Crisp recanted his own testimony and now says those briefings never occurred.
“I identified three occasions where in my evidence I stated that I had regularly briefed the Minister of Police and Emergency Services during the planning period on 27 and 28 March 2020 in the lead up to the operation that would become known as Operation Soteria,” Crisp wrote.
“I wish to correct this in acknowledgment that I did not brief the Minister for Police and Emergency Services throughout the 27 and 28 March 2020 with regard to what was being planned.”
Crisp on Wednesday denied that he was pressured to change the testimony he gave more than six weeks ago but you wouldn’t be alone in wondering what in god’s name is happening in Victoria.
Are we to believe that the emergency chief did not brief the police Minister during a pandemic about a critically important program?
It’s little wonder that trust in public officials has plummeted and sadly that includes perceptions of Victoria Police who are being asked to implement draconian, illogical restrictions and impose crippling fines.
Trust in Victoria Police has dropped from a high of 76 per cent in 2017 to just 42 per cent, according to a new Roy Morgan poll.
The hotel quarantine inquiry showed that the incompetent clowns who run this state think we are all as dumb as a box of rocks.
It’s clear that a royal commission is necessary to determine precisely what happened, who authorised it, and who lied about it under oath.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist