Coronavirus Melbourne: Desperate Daniel Andrews has only himself to blame

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews holds a press conference to discuss the latest COVID-19 situation on Sunday. Picture: David Crosling

Daniel Andrews is now clearly the worst-performing, most unsuccessful premier or territory leader in Australia in managing the COVID-19 outbreak, despite being the most authoritarian.

The Victorian government’s failure is damaging for Victorians and for the whole of Australia.

The rolling lockdowns in ever greater parts of Melbourne, with disadvantaged people now confined in tiny apartments in horrible high-rise buildings, is the direct outcome of the government’s botched performance.

Andrews’s failure is broad, and is both political and technocratic.

The most shocking technocratic mess remains putting untrained security guards into high-stress, technically demanding roles managing sometimes difficult people in hotel quarantine.

Other states used some security guards but they were always supervised by police officers or ­soldiers or other uniformed personnel. That made all the difference in the world.

READ MORE: Millions warned as doors shut on towers |Newman: Read it and weep: sorry tale of a COVID catastrophe |‘We’re so isolated; it’s like a prison’ |Chaos in clampdown state threatens recovery

All the way through this crisis, Andrews has spoken in the most melodramatic terms about the life-and-death consequences of everyday decisions.

If you go out shopping, people will die, no pair of shoes is worth a life, etc. And he positively excoriated golf, apparently the devil’s own pastime.

Illustration: Johannes Leak

Yet when faced with managing a group of people — international returnees going into quarantine — who were almost certainly carrying a disproportionate rate of virus infections, and who were possibly traumatised by the struggle many had to get home at all and were therefore likely to chafe against a fortnight in a hotel room, the ­Andrews government chose the least-trained workforce it could possibly imagine for the job.

This is staggering incompetence. Anyone familiar with the security industry knows how meagre its general training is. Now the security officers, who were neither trained nor equipped nor well paid for the job they were asked to do, have been effectively silenced. But their union has spoken out.

Guards were given 30 seconds training, meaning they just signed a form saying they’d read a piece of paper, or sometimes three minutes training, for the hotel roles. And this on the watch of the Premier who set up a regime that fined ­people for going to Bunnings when Bunnings was legally open.

Premier Daniel Andrews on Sunday. Picture: David Crosling

Now in its customary politburo style, the Victorian government has decided it doesn’t need to answer a single question, nor accept a single iota of democratic accountability for this debacle until an ­official inquiry reports, presumably when the heat has gone out of the issue.

But there were political failures too. The Andrews government was happy to name all sorts of institutions with breakouts when it suited them politically, even a school linked to an inactive case to support the government’s then ­desire to keep schools shut.

But the Cedar Meats abattoir — Labor donors and full of Labor mates — had their identity protected until it was dragged out by the media. This turned out to be a very significant outbreak. Surely common sense tells you that naming them early would have encouraged any of their casual contacts to get tested. A measure of a political leader’s quality is how stringently they will speak to their own supporters when necessary. Andrews notionally discouraged demonstrators, but his efforts to get people not to attend the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were pitiful.

If you go shopping, people will die, never translated into: if you go demonstrating, people will die.

That looks like a cross between political expediency and political cowardice.

In all this, the federal government, despite its genuine achievements, has also been giving two bad bits of advice lately.

Professor Raina Macintyre, a distinguished epidemiologist at the University of NSW, tells me there is clear, utterly convincing clinical evidence that wearing a face mask protects healthy people from getting the virus as well as preventing infected people from spreading the virus.

Masks are not perfectly effective but they are much better than nothing. Numerous overseas jurisdictions have made them compulsory, or at least compulsory on public transport.

A Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne Picture: Alex Coppel.

The only reason to advise against wearing them routinely is to protect the supply. But modern life is full of the mass use of disposable items, such as takeaway coffee cups. Masks are not in short supply any more. With Melbourne experiencing this desperately worrying outbreak, people should be routinely encouraged to wear masks on public transport and at shopping centres, where social distancing looks extremely limited.

The other feeble bit of advice from the federal government is that all interstate borders should be open. If a state has zero or near zero cases, such as Queensland and South Australia and Western Australia, it would be madness for them to open their borders to ­Victorians at the moment.

It’s all very well to respect the science. But we ought to respect common sense as well.