Rita Panahi: Hotel quarantine inquiry shows Victorians being played for fools
The only evidence gained from the hotel quarantine inquiry is that a unique strain of amnesia has rendered members of the Victorian government and bureaucracy deaf, dumb and blind, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rita Panahi. Followed categories will be added to My News.
They’re just taking the piss now.
There’s no eloquent way to describe the systematic cover-up that sees senior bureaucrats and ministers claim, under oath, that not only did they have nothing to do with disastrous decisions that have devastated the state, but they don’t even know who did.
Ministers Jenny Mikakos, Lisa Neville and Martin Pakula claim they were blissfully ignorant of what was happening in their departments and to this day don’t know who made the critical decision to engage private security firms to oversee the hotel quarantine program.
These aren’t junior ministers with toy portfolios, they are senior members of the state government who preside over key departments, but to listen to their evidence at the hotel quarantine inquiry, you’d think they spend their days playing Sudoku and ignoring their inbox.
Apparently Jobs Minister Pakula was so oblivious of his role during a pandemic he can’t even recall how he found out about the scheme — “it may have even been from media reportage,” he said.
Despite the fact his department selected the security companies, Pakula says he was “rarely” briefed on the details.
Police Minister Neville is similarly clueless about who made the decision to use private security with her evidence contradicting that of Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp; both claim the other told them about the program.
Neville also learned of key developments including the request for Australian Defence Force assistance via the Herald Sun. If their evidence is to be believed, members of Andrews’ crisis cabinet would have no idea what was going on were it not for this paper.
Certainly none thus far have shed any light on who made the decision to spend $60m of public money on security guards when trained ADF personnel were available at no cost.
Arguably, the minister with the greatest culpability is Mikakos, whose department had overall responsibility of the hotel scheme including infection control.
Alas, it appears Mikakos is also afflicted with a unique strain of amnesia that has rendered members of the Victorian government and bureaucracy deaf, dumb and blind.
On Thursday she told the inquiry she too didn’t know who made the decision to use private security and “the fact that the DHHS is designated as the control agency for the pandemic response as a whole did not mean DHHS was running operation Soteria”.
Operation Soteria, named presumably after the Greek goddess of safety and salvation, was a dumpster fire of incompetence and mismanagement from day one but no one is taking responsibility for that either.
Mikakos said she only learned security guards were being used in May; the program began in late March.
These ministers are members of the crisis cabinet or the gang-of-eight responsible for Victoria’s COVID-19 response and they appear unanimously clueless about what occurred under their watch.
Victoria has a coronavirus death rate of 116 per million of population, the rest of Australia has a death rate of less than five per million of population.
A royal commission into the Victorian catastrophe is essential and not just one limited to hotel quarantine, but also the botched contact tracing program and much more.
It is utterly perverse the Andrews government is seeking to keep secret the advice behind the decision to impose and extend a curfew on more than five million people. What sort of Orwellian police state do we live in where the government argues in the Supreme Court the expert advice it has received should not be released?
But secrecy and scandalously stupid decision-making have characterised much of Victoria’s COVID-19 response. No wonder the main players have such poor memories.
Thus far, we’ve had three senior ministers along with Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, deputy CHO Annaliese van Diemen, State Controllers Jason Helps and Andrea Spiteri, former police chief commissioner Graham Ashton, and incumbent Shane Patton, plus the state’s top bureaucrat, Chris Eccles, along with a bunch of other senior bureaucrats and department heads all tell the inquiry that they have no idea who made the fateful decision to engage private security firms.
They are treating the Victorian public like we’re gullible mugs who’ll believe anything no matter how fanciful or absurd.
Friday is mercifully the last day of the multimillion-dollar inquiry, at which the Premier will appear in the afternoon.
One can only hope his memory has improved from last month when he misled a parliamentary inquiry on the availability of ADF personnel.
IN SHORT: A new study from Japan has cast doubt on the effectiveness of plastic face shields worn by some instead of masks. The government backed research using a “supercomputer” found most droplets, including close to 100 per cent of droplets smaller than 5 micrometres, escaped through the visor.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist