It was the wrong choice for which no one took responsibility.
And after months of evidence, Jennifer Coate has found not one single person was responsible for the decision to use private security in Victoria’s hotel quarantine program.
Not the Premier. Not his Ministers. Not his senior bureaucrats.
The closest we get to individual accountability is Coate’s finding that the use of security guards stemmed from former top cop Graham Ashton’s preference that private security, not police, be the scheme’s first tier of enforcement.
Coate finds there was no actual consideration of whether ADF personnel would have been a better option. Instead, an early mention of private security rather than police grew into a settled position, adopted by acquiescence at a state control centre meeting on March 27.
While acknowledging decisions were being made quickly, Coate finds that not one of the more than 70,000 documents produced to the inquiry “demonstrated a contemporaneous rationale for the decision to use private security as the first tier of enforcement, or an approval of that rationale in the upper levels of government.”
She says this finding is “likely to shock the public”. But will it? Anyone who has followed the inquiry would not be surprised that the decision everyone in government was desperate to flee from was not documented.
Coate says the decision to use private security was made without proper analysis or “even a clear articulation that it was being made at all”.
In somewhat understated terms, she says “on its face, this was at odds with any normal application of the principles of the Westminster system of responsible government.
“That a decision of such significance for a government program, which ultimately involved the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and the employment of thousands of people, had neither a responsible Minister nor a transparent rationale for why that course was adopted, plainly does not seem to accord with those principles”.
Without close monitoring and extensive training, security guards should not have worked in hotel quarantine The implications of using a largely casualised workforce with a lack of job security in an environment where staff had a high likelihood of being exposed to the highly infectious COVID-19 was not considered.
Instead deploying a fully salaried, highly structured workforce with a strong industrial focus on workplace safety, such as Victoria Police, would have been more appropriate, would have minimised the risk of outbreaks occurring and made contact tracing an easier job in the wake of an outbreak.
Andrews apologised on Monday for the program’s “errors”, insisting the scheme’s key failing was its lack of oversight which he argued had since been rectified.
At the height of the Victorian crisis, it was speculated that Coate’s eventual findings had the potential to put the Premier’s position in jeopardy.
But Coate’s report does not contain any damning direct findings against Andrews. It will not take him out.
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