Donald Trump, stand aside. Short of donning a red baseball cap and promising to Make Victoria Great Again, Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley could not have been any less subtle on Tuesday as he repeatedly blamed “the South Australian outbreak” for Victoria’s woes.
Apeing Trump’s “China virus” stylings, Foley might as well have ended his press conference announcing the construction of a great and beautiful wall running from Mount Gambier to the Murray to keep his people safe from the South Australian hordes.
“The genomic sequencing has confirmed that case is directly linked to the South Australian outbreak,” Foley said on Wednesday.
And again: “This is confirming in our minds that this is all the one related cluster from the South Australian hotel breach.”
In case you missed it: “Our public health team are actually seeing more and more of this in this particular South Australian hotel outbreak playing out.”
If the schmaltzy slogan of 2020 was “We are all in this together”, the catchcry for 2021 appears to be: “Don’t blame us, it was the other guys.”
The blame game
Foley’s press conference was emblematic of the backside-covering that now infects our fractured federation at both the state and federal level.
For the Commonwealth, it’s ducking responsibility for quarantine and dissembling over the lacklustre vaccine rollout and its substandard management of federal aged care.
For the states, it’s transparent, poll-driven boastfulness about how they’re all apparently leading the world in vaccine distribution, virus containment and contact tracing, yet pointing in another direction when things go wrong.
What we are seeing now in Australia is not good public policy. It is state of origin.
I am not so patriotic a South Australian to deny that my home state clearly played a terrible role in the Victorian outbreak, even though the breach does appear to be a strange and unforeseen case of aerosol contamination between neighbouring residents through open hotel doors. It has rightly invited questions as to the appropriateness of using hotels for quarantine and whether Canberra should create bespoke quarantine accommodation away from major capitals.
But when some 20 breaches have occurred nationally, it is blame-shifting of the highest order for Foley to focus so inordinately and deliberately on the source of the outbreak, rather than the subsequent management of the outbreak.
Credibility problem
The damning credibility problem for Victoria comes when you make the comparison to the NSW Government. Premier Berejiklian has managed to rein in repeated Sydney outbreaks, including the alarming Barbecues Galore case, through meticulous contact tracing rather than the brute force of imprisoning citizens and shutting down the economy.
Also, if “the South Australian outbreak” as Martin Foley calls it was so bad, why has it only spread throughout Victoria, yet nowhere in South Australia? There were more than 1500 Port Adelaide fans within spitting distance of an infected person at the Collingwood game at the MCG, yet all have been contacted, all accounted for, and none of them are sick.
QR shambles
That’s the real problem for the Victorian Government. Other states have for months had strongly observed and enforced QR code systems and effective contact tracing, while Victoria only moved to universal QR codes on Friday of last week, with a shambolic grab-bag of apps and handwritten notes in place prior. South Australians I know who travelled recently to Melbourne – before the border closed – were stunned by the fact that QR coding seemed non-existent in the state that was hit hardest by Covid.
Be more Gladys
Further, it is somewhat audacious for Mr Foley to give anyone a free lecture on the proper management of hotel quarantine, given that Victoria’s hotel-based system was revealed last year to be more akin to a rerun of John Belushi’s Animal House, with private guards cracking onto infected female guests, the subsequent human toll of that scandal being a grim matter of record.
My tip from over the border for Mr Foley – here at infection central in SA – would be forget your inner Donald and try to find your inner Gladys.
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