Wounded Andrews finally settles for the achievable

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews made two overdue admissions following the resignation of the state’s most senior public servant, Chris Eccles, on Monday. On lifting the stifling lockdown restrictions placed on Victorians under emergency powers he oversees, Mr Andrews said: “We will have to make concessions to what is achievable.” He then said: “Being popular or political has never been less important to me.” Victoria and the nation can only hope these comments are substantial and not more spin.

Setting unrealistic goals has got Victoria into its present predicament. Being political has weakened the state’s governing structures and institutions, and now has started to cut a swath through state cabinet and the senior public service. Mr Andrews belatedly is attempting to navigate out of a dead-end alley of his own making. He is paying a long-term price for the short-term opportunity of calling a board of inquiry into the state’s quarantine fiasco to deflect questions and defer judgment. The setting up of the inquiry, in the way it was, was a political decision. It could have been dealt with immediately by admitting that mistakes had been made. Instead, there have been weeks of distraction that have claimed the scalp of former health minister Jenny Mikakos, who has since criticised the Premier’s handling of emergency powers and his evidence to the inquiry.

The inquiry, led by vigorous media questioning of Mr Andrews, forced the resignation of Mr Andrews’ right-hand man, Mr Eccles, as secretary of the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. The contrast is the Ruby Princess disaster in NSW, where the systemic problem was identified quickly and fixed. Mr Eccles fell on his sword after discovering his phone records contradicted his evidence to the inquiry. On the way out he was lauded by Mr Andrews as an outstanding servant to the public whose career had spanned several decades. The Premier welcomed Mr Eccles’ decision to resign as the proper thing to do. The substance of Mr Eccles’ telephone call to police commissioner Graham Ashton that sealed his fate is not known. But the timing coincides with advice to Mr Ashton that private security guards, not police, would be used to guard people in hotel quarantine.

The decision to use security guards is not of itself the problem and it easily might be explained within the culture of the state ALP. What matters is the failure in supervision of private contractors to do the job properly after they had been appointed. The deaths of more than 790 people in Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 can be traced to failings of the hotel quarantine scheme. There is still much to learn about how the decision to use private contractors was made, by whom, why and whether anyone received an unfair advantage for government contracts involving very significant sums of money. Mr Andrews’ chief of staff has become the focus of new questions that to date appear to have been overlooked by the inquiry.

Mr Andrews’ apparent change of heart on whether Victoria’s lockdown restrictions can be loosened before previously set markers have been met reflects a growing pressure as well as public fatigue and loss of patience by business. In addition, there has been a mixed message from the World Health Organisation on the wisdom of severe lockdowns of the sort imposed in Victoria. WHO coronavirus special envoy David Nabarro said the organisation did “not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus”. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it,” he said. The WHO has attempted to backtrack on Dr Nabarro’s advice, which has been its longstanding position, casting further doubt on the UN body’s reliability and competence.

Schadenfreude aside, there is nothing to celebrate in any of Victoria’s or the WHO’s trials and tribulations. The havoc being wreaked by the pandemic is beyond politics, and events playing out in Victoria can be described only as a tragedy. Freedoms have been restricted and livelihoods diminished because leaders have been unable to navigate a reality that should have been discovered long ago; concessions must be made to what is achievable. The Victorian experience highlights an unfortunate fact of public life that when bad decisions are made and things go wrong, leaders can be too quick to take things personally. Mr Andrews is using overly long daily briefings to convey a sense of openness. In reality it is more about control. But Victoria’s crisis is not about Mr Andrews, who will be long gone before the full cost of his tenure can be assessed. The brutal truth is that powerful leaders are powerful for only a short time before they are replaced and quickly forgotten. Mr Andrews just happens to be the person in the chair at this particular time.