Coronavirus, Peta Credlin: Too much we’re not being told about Victoria’s hotel quarantine fiasco

Justice Jennifer Coate should consider reopening hearings and recalling witnesses.

The Coate inquiry into Victoria’s hotel quarantine fiasco is said to be resisting pressure to reopen hearings and recall witnesses.

So nothing more will be made public until the final report. No more witnesses, no more interrogation of the evidence, not that there was much in the first place. Indeed, there are questions about how serious this ever was about discovering the truth.

I’d been calling for the phone records for some time. It’s not rocket science; the more officials and ministers said they couldn’t remember, the more they elevated the argument for their release.

Over the weekend the inquiry demanded phone records. Not every record — many ministers and departments weren’t asked — but as we know, Premier Daniel Andrews, his office and his now former head public servant, Chris Eccles, were.

They could have volunteered them in the first instance; Andrews insisted he set up the inquiry to discover the truth. It all sounds like a Premier and a board of inquiry doing the least they have to do rather than the most they might.

Those records disclosed that Eccles called then police commissioner Graham Ashton on Friday, March 27, after which the commissioner, obviously relieved, told his federal counterpart private security guards would be working in quarantine hotels.

Likewise, given the meagre results of the inquiry up until 10 days ago, and what we know now, it would be a travesty if witnesses were not re-examined or, indeed, some called for the first time.

Among Melbourne’s legal circles there is growing embarrassment about what this inquiry isn’t asking for, who it is not recalling to the box, and the manner in which hearings were conducted by counsel assisting. The job of counsel assisting is to assist the inquiry chair to get to the truth. That’s not what appears to have happened; counsel assisting appears to have read back the written witness statements before asking rudimentary questions. The witness statements were not pushed and probed enough. And what about this nebulous nonsense in the closing submission about a “creeping assumption”?

All ministers are sworn in by the Governor of Victoria — under law, to have authority over specific pieces of legislation, or acts. It’s not a collective authority. It’s one minister with a Bible in hand, sworn in, and in government decisions are made by that minister under those specific laws, paper is signed off, contracts signed and taxpayer money spent.

Much has come to light since the hearings closed; Justice Jennifer Coate should consider reopening hearings and recalling witnesses. It’s not credible that Victoria went off on a frolic, no one making a specific decision to do so.

Chris Eccles.

Graham Ashton.

Remember the critical six minutes between 1.16pm and 1.22pm on that key Friday? Ashton thought he’d had a call from someone in that time but couldn’t remember who. Eccles was sure he hadn’t called, though Ashton had subsequently texted the federal police chief saying it had been the Premier’s Department that came up with the private security deal.

Clearly, someone had made this decision, and with enough authority to satisfy the police chief, who’d never wanted his officers “babysitting” returning travellers.

Given this clear failure by Eccles to remember this phone call under oath, why not call him back? What else might he remember?

There was no creeping assumption; according to the police submission “a decision was made to engage private security … before the 2pm meeting” involving the police chief, Police Minister and emergency management commissioner. The Premier’s chief of staff was the first person Eccles briefed on the national cabinet decision to introduce hotel quarantine. Jobs Department head Simon Phemister then put the process in train that led to the engagement of Unified Security, a company not on the list of preferred tenderers, but that somehow won the lion’s share of the work — a $30m contract for three months’ work. How can this inquiry regard its job as done without calling the Premier’s chief of staff to give evidence? I know what chiefs of staff do; they don’t get briefed on cabinet meetings and then sit twiddling their thumbs.

How could Phemister have set up the private security contracts without knowing how this had come to be authorised? What public servants would spend $30m without being clear about the authority for it? And how did this escape detailed probing by the counsel assisting this inquiry? And what about the Premier? He announced private security was doing the job at 3.15pm that Friday, but now can’t remember who made the decision.

The inquiry must look into this — especially as the former health minister, who’d listened to his evidence the day after she’d given hers, and resigned on the strength of it, has issued a formal statement saying the Premier’s evidence should be “treated with caution”.

Once it was clear Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 deaths flowed from the hotel quarantine bungle, and once the Premier set up an inquiry without coercive powers to compel the appearance of witnesses and the production of documents; and given that he then avoided questions from the media by hiding behind this inquiry — the suspicion must arise that government was not seeking to uncover the truth, but to hide the guilty. The inquiry into hotel quarantine needs to do its job, be seen to be doing its job, and to do it without fear or favour to not just honour Victoria’s 800 dead but to restore faith in a system that let Australians down.

Peta Credlin is host of Credlin on Sky News, 6pm Monday-Friday.