So which minister has accepted direct responsibility for it?
Answer: none.
Which minister has apologised and resigned over a mess that will cost countless billions of dollars to the Victorian and national economies and have as yet unknowable health consequences?
Answer: no one.
The Victorian government has not even told us which minister was chiefly responsible for deciding to use untrained security guards. Instead, it established a judicial inquiry that it exploits to say it has no responsibility to provide any public information. Yet the inquiry report is months away.
Who are we to think that we have a right to know such things? We are mere citizens. What business is it of ours?
I make these points not as a rhetorical device but to draw attention to one aspect of the Victorian catastrophe that is not getting enough consideration and that signifies a larger failure of political culture. The performance of the Andrews government has been so disastrous partly because there is no effective democracy in Victoria.
Let me be clear. Victoria is not a tyranny. And I am not objecting to the necessary lockdown provisions caused by the resurgence of the virus. What I mean is that all the normal mechanisms of democratic deliberation and accountability have been diminished or erased in Victoria. This is true of state jurisdictions around Australia, but it is extreme in Victoria.
Bizarrely, and for no good reason, the Victorian parliament is not sitting and is not due to sit until next month. When asked about the opposition this week, Andrews said he didn’t have time for silly political games. That is exactly the tone that non-democratic leaders take. Politics is a distraction from their greatness.
The only chance of any useful accountability or scrutiny for the hotels fiasco lay with the Victorian parliament’s public accounts and estimates committee. The committee has 10 members: five Labor, three Coalition, one Green and one Liberal Democrat. Every non-Labor member voted to hold an inquiry that would call senior bureaucrats and ministers. The Labor chairwoman used her casting vote to ensure no hearings were held.
When Andrews was asked about this, his response was contemptuous. He knew nothing about the committee, no concern of his, he hadn’t been briefed on it and didn’t intend to give it a moment’s thought. It was a response Fidel Castro would have been proud of.
Andrews is no dictator. He is a democratically elected Premier who operates entirely within the law. Nor is he extreme in his rhetoric or most of his policies. But he has contrived a circumstance in which almost all mechanisms of democratic scrutiny and accountability have disappeared.
This is not just wrong in principle. It produces really bad government. The judicial inquiry was entirely unnecessary. The government has to hand all the information and all the people that could possibly be required.
The obvious political purpose of the inquiry is to allow Andrews to refuse to answer any question, or provide any information at all, about how this colossal policy failure came about.
In a properly functioning democratic culture, Andrews would come under irresistible political pressure to answer the questions and provide the information. But under the emasculated political culture that surrounds state governments — and is so exaggerated in Victoria — there is no way the political culture can bring that pressure to bear.
The Victorian Premier does not even face the constraints of his own party. Adem Somyurek was a minister in the Andrews government who was caught on film using very bad language and was accused of ethnic branch stacking. I feel like the police chief in Casablanca — “Branch stacking in the ALP?” (or, in Casablanca, “Gambling in a casino?”) I am shocked, truly shocked.
So the federal ALP intervened in the Victorian ALP, and it will now be run by administrators until 2023. There will be no state conference, no internal democracy, no motions or resolutions. Nothing. The Andrews government is free even of its own political party.
The government rides roughshod over any democratic politics.
The NSW ALP, with all its scandals from Sam Dastyari to Kaila Murnain and now to ASIO and federal police inquiries about alleged improper Chinese government influence, does not apparently justify federal intervention. But the Victorian party and its 14,000-odd members do. Why? In six months, the federal ALP could easily have checked the membership rolls of the Victorian party. But, you see, the NSW party provides no factional problems, whereas the Victorian party had shown disturbing signs of independent life and thought.
Not least was the deep disquiet many Victorian Labor members, and a number of unions, left and right, had about the Andrews government’s slavish pro-Beijing policies and especially its embrace of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, contrary to Australian national policy. Andrews requires his ministers to visit China quite a bit. Somyurek refused because of his objection to Chinese mistreatment of Uighurs. He went to India instead. Now there will be no Victorian ALP conference and no resolutions on the Belt and Road policy, which there would have been without federal intervention.
What are Victorian rank-and-file ALP members now but donkeys, required only to pay their dues and show up on election day to distribute how to vote cards? And what is the Victorian government now other than an unconstrained collection of careerist, empire-building politicians and apparatchiks on the payroll?
The ABC has also failed us. For a long time its 7.30 Report was state-based. This provided an invaluable service to Australian democracy. The ABC routinely argues that because it doesn’t need to pursue profits it can do things that commercial media can’t. Australian political culture is gravely deficient right now because of a lack of sustained scrutiny of state governments. The state-based newspapers do a good job but have never been more leanly staffed.
The state press gallery in Melbourne is a ghostly chamber. Digital media companies have destroyed the public square except at the national level.
If the ABC was serving the nation, it would make sure it covered state politics properly. I could bear the loss of quite a lot of ABC comedy in return for good state political coverage. A state government should not get scrutiny only when its mistakes — such as those of the Andrews government — are so egregious as to demand national attention.
Democracy has collapsed in Victoria. So has good government.
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