Nowhere to hide for those behind Victoria quarantine fiasco

WorkSafe Victoria chief, Colin Radford (inset), and one of the hotels where the bungled hotel quaratine scheme unfolded, Melbourne's Rydges on Swanton. Pictures:

The head of the inquiry into Victoria’s quarantine fiasco, Jennifer Coate has done her job. The evidence she unveiled showed a staggering breakdown in the systems of government and management. We saw chaotic differences between public servants and uncertainty as to what they were supposed to be doing.

That makes the chief of WorkSafe Victoria, Colin Radford, the most powerful person in Australia outside premiers and the Prime Minister.

Radford now has the task of taking the Coate inquiry evidence to the next stage and is armed with powers that were designed to break through any corporate legal shields preventing the prosecution of boards and top management in situations where management and training systems had broken down and people were killed or injured as a result. If industrial manslaughter is involved the penalty can up be up to 25 years in jail.

Radford can insist on looking at all cabinet and ministerial documents; all ministers and public servants emails, notes and phone records. He has extensive powers of cross examination.

There are no secrets in the Victorian government that Radford doesn’t have the power to uncover.

As far as we know he has not used these powers, despite more than six weeks of investigation. He must decide which ministers and public servants, if any, to recommend for prosecution.

Radford’s first deadline is December 29 but he can ask for more time, although this crisis started many months ago and if it had been a chemical explosion in a factory owned by a corporation with many deaths he would have been using his powers from day one.

The Victorian director of public prosecutions, Kerri Judd QC — the state’s first female in that role — has to make the decision whether to prosecute. Radford’s appointed task of deciding whether to recommend prosecution is made more difficult by the fact that he knows many of the people he is investigating because he was press secretary to former premier Steve Bracks.

If Radford feels conflicted he should stand down but there is no reason why he must stand down because a recommendation to prosecute does not mean guilt — that’s up to the courts to decide.

Inquiry head Jennifer Coate.

The best way to explain what happened in Victoria is to use industrial language. I ask my readers to forgive me for using this dehumanising process. I don’t like it but it’s appropriate to illustrate the WorkSafe situation that Radford faces.

The Victorian government, like all other state governments, was required to set up a germ processing factory.

The essence of the operation was to keep processing units insulated from the staff who were in grave danger of become infected, so putting their lives at risk. Because of the clearly understood danger they required careful training and supervision plus the right protective gear. It did not happen.

Unlike conventional processing units the risk was not that the germs would escape into the air like smoke, but that workers, if they became infected, would spread the germs through the community. And, of course, that’s what happened and hundreds of people died.

Every state used the cabinet responsibility and accountability system to administer these germ processing units. But Victoria abandoned that system and introduced an untried “mission system” to run the operation. It set up missions that crossed well established departmental systems and reported to the Premier’s office and to the department of premier and cabinet. There were eight if these “missions” It was a totally untried way of organising the response to a crisis and as the Coate inquiry showed, it was a total failure.

The occupational health and safety act in Victoria aims to make management responsible for injuries and death, so placed great emphasis on systems and training. Victoria had carefully planned cabinet responsibility system for a crisis sitting in the drawer. Similar systems were successfully used in all other states. Victoria did not use that system and the plan continues to gather dust in the drawer.

As we now know the germs escaped and daily infections rose to more than 700 and the total number of people infected rose above 8000. Deaths exceeded 800. It was Australia’s worst industrial accident.

The only way to overcome the crisis was to virtually shut down large areas of the state, creating unprecedented economic damage. That worked in reducing infections and death but returning to normal has to be handled with great care, partly because the mission system appears to be still in operation. In addition the systems and training breakdown has been further highlighted by the possibility of widespread blood infection of diseases other than COVID-19.

The Victorian Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet has stood down. The person selected to replace him — Jeremi Moule — was the Department’s Deputy Secretary of “Governance Policy and Coordination”.

The chaos the missions system is still creating was further illustrated this week when one arm allowed owners to attend the centenary of the Cox Plate, and this was reversed by another arm soon after. The sooner cabinet accountability and responsibility is restored the sooner Victoria can regain prosperity.