Coronavirus: Quarantine at Victorian hotels should never have been contracted out by Daniel Andrews

Illustration: Johannes Leak

How are the mighty fallen. Until just recently it seemed that if there were one figure in Australia who could crush the COVID virus by pure power of will it was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Now he is presiding over an infection rate higher than Italy’s and has been driven to restore lockdown measures for some Melbourne suburbs that have recorded an alarming exponential spike in the spread of the virus. And the way Victorians rank his handling of the virus, according to Newspoll, has dropped dramatically.

There was talk for a while of calling out the army. There has been the recruitment of corrective services staff to administer hotel quarantines which have been so woefully handled under Andrews’s watch that he is establishing an inquiry.

Illustration: Tom Jellet

Meanwhile, quite a few people in Melbourne’s north and west, many of whom have ethnic backgrounds, have been refusing to have tests. No doubt they have their own reasons to be wary of the state, but couldn’t Andrews have worked through community leaders — imams, priests, whoever — to make these recalcitrant people more amenable? Now he’s been driven to talk tough again and to impose new quarantine measures that take affect from Thursday. He is also imposing strategic booze bus-style checks on the part of the police and on-the-spot fines.

Level three lockdown measure will apply to the hotspot suburbs, the full stringency of which Melburnians have been sighing with relief to be released from.

But this is Andrews’s default position. He is an impressive character, and throughout the ­crisis he has played the tough cop to Scott Morrison’s softie. It was Andrews who was always saying don’t think this means you could have all your mates round for beers. It was Andrews who gave the impression that he would have us all locked in our bedrooms if he thought it was necessary. And now he is doing it again.

If you’re in an afflicted area, don’t think you can skip into the city to go “shoe shopping”, he warned with dire severity. His down-to-earth examples are part of what has given him his peculiar authority during the crisis. It’s all been a cometh the hour, cometh the leader (as it has been with Morrison, but a bit differently). But there is something about ­Andrews’s grave outraged rectitude that made the deepest impression on people in the nation’s second largest state.

It helped that he tended to sound like an old-fashioned headmaster. At the height of Victoria’s lockdown, the overwhelming ­majority of people did everything in their power to observe at least the spirit of the Premier’s strictures. Now he is in a position where there’s been a drop of 13 per cent in the number of people who think he’s doing a pretty good job. (Though 72 per cent still believe he has handled things “reasonably well”.) But that old sense of Dan as the man who would save everybody has plummeted.

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews.

Most of this is bad luck, although the general perception of Andrews as a politician of iron integrity probably wasn’t helped by the recent revelations of branch stacking in the ALP, any more than it was kicked along by the Belt and Road deal with China.

At the end of the day, the buck stops with the Premier. The ­preposterous and culpable inefficiency in maintaining the quarantine at hotels such as the Stamford Plaza and Rydges that has led to a disproportionate increase in the number of infections is his responsibility. The quarantine should never have been contracted out and should have been overseen with the utmost government stringency.

Still, at a time of plague, horrors happen. Elsewhere around the world we have seen British Prime Minister Boris Johnson handle the coronavirus inexpertly, not to mention US President Donald Trump. Compared with most people in positions of responsibility internationally, Andrews has not done too badly. It’s clear just how determined he is to stop the spread of the virus in Victoria and what looks like a Melbourne-based second wave from turning into a tidal wave of contagion that could overwhelm the nation. It doesn’t help that this southern spike coincides with the moment when everything was set to relax: where you could have that drink in the pub, and buy shoes to your heart’s content.

For all that, at least we know with Andrews that if he had to ­impose martial law to conquer the virus, he would. You could do worse. One of the myths we cling to about Australia is that we’re pretty good soldiers. There’s the Anzac spirit, the extraordinary record of the Kokoda Track in World War II, as well as the national desolations represented by Gallipoli in World War I and the prisoner-of-war horrors at Changi in World War II. What we face with the virus is comparable to a time of war and it comes, by necessity, with its own confusions and setbacks.

There is a grim irony in the fact such a born warrior as Andrews should be overseeing the wreckage of our brightest hopes. It’s hard to imagine anyone better equipped, however, to battle on.