Coronavirus Australia: Late to the game, but finally Daniel Andrews changes contact tracing plan
This is just a hunch, but I reckon Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews could be on to something when he announced on Tuesday that coronavirus contact tracing teams would be sent to Sydney, in his words, to “double and triple check whether there is anything that is different between our response and the response in New South Wales”.
You don’t say? I mean we are talking Victoria with only 701 deaths and 19,739 cases of coronavirus, compared to 52 and 4,135 respectively in New South Wales. Just some minor differences in those numbers I would have thought, not to mention Victoria’s relying on pen, paper, and fax machines for contact tracing. Displaying remarkable prescience, Andrews said the whole system would be digitised. From now on Victorians will receive an automated notification in the event of a positive test, much like what Western Australia and South Australia adopted six months ago.
Cutting edge stuff?
But funnily enough the Andrews Government was telling us for months that its tracing system was cutting edge stuff. Treasurer Tim Pallas, May 6: “What is going on here is outstanding, world-leading tracking and checking strategies and I think the Chief Health Officer and his staff deserve commendation for it.” Andrews, May 7: “I am very confident that the team … they are among the best in the world at what they do, will continue to do that job in the interests of every single Victorian, their safety and the recovery from this global pandemic.” Andrews again on May 7: “They follow up every lead and they do it diligently”. Diligently? In many cases people who had inadvertently been in contact with an infected person were not even notified until a fortnight after the diagnosis.
You can only wonder what methodology the Department of Health and Human Services uses if it takes this long. I can only surmise their philosophy was inspired by the BBC
documentary Seven Up! which featured recurring interviews with subjects every seven years. Yes, I can picture some bureaucrat in 2027 as he makes a phone call. “Hello Ms Jones? It’s Barry from DHHS, and we’re just ringing to let you know that when you were in high school, you were in the same room as someone who tested positive COVID-19. Just checking in case you’re not feeling 100 per cent today.”
If this system is world-leading, then clearly many of us are ignorant of the facts. Or perhaps the previous comparisons involved a somewhat limited group. Dig around DHHS archives and you will probably find a self-serving video featuring one of its senior executives saying something along the lines of “Having conducted an international benchmarking exercise, I am pleased to say our contact tracing system is world leading, and I would like to thank the governments of Burkina Faso, Yemen, Tuvalu, and Haiti for their participation”.
Initiative versus intervention
It says it all about the Andrews Government’s response to the second wave that one of the few success stories is a result of community initiative as opposed to DHHS intervention. Take for example the regional local government area of Colac-Otway, where frustrated locals, following the outbreak of 83 cases linked to the Australian Lamb Company abattoir in the town, decided to run contact tracing themselves, rather than leave it in the hands of hapless DHHS bureaucrats.
Subsequently, as Rachel Baxendale of this newspaper reported last month, the region “recorded the most significant net decrease in active cases in percentage terms of any [local government area] in Victoria with more than 10 cases”. And this is not just a case of regional
Victoria going its own way. As the ABC reported yesterday, local doctors in the Melbourne suburb of Altona North have given up on contact tracing and are managing cases themselves. Tracing ‘woeful’
Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, a former president of the Australian Medical Association who is leading the initiative, described contact tracing as “woeful,” saying “the whole public health response in Victoria had been dumbed down”.
This is not an isolated view. “When it comes to public health infrastructure and resources per head of population, Victoria is much worse off than any other state in Australia,” said infectious diseases expert professor Raina MacIntyre this week. “Victoria is just a shell of a system, it’s just been decimated, and that’s fine in the good times, you can get by on a minimal model, but when there’s a pandemic all those weaknesses are exposed.”
And then there is the economic outlook. According to a KPMG analysis released this week Victoria’s economy will contract by 20 per cent on pre-pandemic levels, due to extended restrictions and business shutdowns, the resultant hit to the state in the September quarter potentially being $6bn. Think back 30 years ago to Victoria under Labor Premiers John McCain and Joan Kirner when the state faced financial ruin. Yet only four months ago the Victorian Treasurer’s commitments were such he decided to be a poor man’s shadow foreign affairs minister, criticising the federal government for “vilifying” China over its calls for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak.
Standing with Dan
Andrews is not short of defenders for his pigheadedness in planning to eliminate the virus without regard for the economic consequences, although the #IStandWithDan mob are such that even the Moonies would call them unhinged. Commenting in The Age this week on revelations that Victorian police and local councils were using mobile surveillance units to monitor citizens in public spaces to detect breaches of the Chief Health Officer’s directions, Liberty Victoria president Julian Burnside QC was remarkably sanguine, saying “It all sounds pretty sensible to me”. He also stated the curtailing of normal liberties is “justifiable” during times of war, drawing the analogy between armed conflict and a pandemic.
In what was a humiliating comeuppance for the great wheezer, Liberty Victoria distanced itself from its president’s comments, tweeting that “they didn’t precisely align with Liberty’s position on the matter”.
This is the equivalent of a QC being called a learned dill by his junior in a courtroom.
Our President Julian Burnside is reported in today’s Age expressing a view about the appropriate level of curtailment of human rights in response to COVID19. The comment was a reflection of Julian’s personal view, but didn’t precisely align with Liberty’s position on the matter.
— Liberty Victoria (Vic Council for Civil Liberties) (@LibertyVic) September 6, 2020
Presumably Burnside also thought the arbitrary imposition of an 8pm curfew across Melbourne was justifiable too. As we discovered this week from the belated admissions of the Premier and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton when pressed, this was Andrews’ decision, not one based on medical advice. Note for civil liberties presidents: do not believe everything the government tells you.
Burnside is not the only high-profile Dan disciple who kids himself. Writing in The Age this week former ABC Melbourne radio host Jon Faine denounced the supposed “reckless and self-interested bullying” of Andrews by the media and corporate interests. Playing down the damage to the economy that the extended restrictions were causing, he was dismissive of those business owners facing financial collapse. “Undoubtedly there are many small and even large businesses that are struggling and some will go under,” he said breezily. “That happened last year too, and every other year.”
Disconnect, as business reels
One struggles to describe in polite language this degree of disconnectedness. The same KPMG analysis previously mentioned has predicted a worst-case scenario of 350,000 Victorians losing their jobs in the three months to September, on top of the 250,000 already unemployed due to the pandemic. Faine was at the ABC for 30 years, and some of the business owners he arrogantly referred to would have contributed to his taxpayer-funded salary. How much he received in total from the public we do not know, although in 2013 he freely disclosed his salary was $300,000. But it was never money for jam. No, no, as Faine angrily declared on radio in 2018, “I’ve been here since 1989 busting my guts for a vision and a set of values …” And to think those struggling business owners believe they have it tough.
Conceding that “no one can excuse” the government’s errors regarding hotel quarantine or contact tracing, Faine maintained that “those mistakes, terrible as they are, do not disqualify the government from governing,” adding that calls for Andrews to resign were “astonishing”.
In other words, Victorians should excuse the government’s many errors. But we should not expect Faine and his ilk to write objectively about the failures of the Andrews Government, irrespective of the deaths it has caused or the economic catastrophe that will follow. After all, these same journalists have worked hard over the years to progress a centre-left ideology. You could even say they have busted a gut doing so.
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