It was curious to learn from her Twitter posts late on Saturday night that Victoria’s embattled Health Minister has a bust of Pericles on her desk as inspiration. The revelation made it all the more intriguing that Jenny Mikakos posted a Twitter thread instead of answering questions in the Victorian parliament when she had the chance. The Athenian statesman who laid the foundations for our democratic political system must surely be murmuring that Twitter is no substitute for democracy.
Mikakos’s Twitter thread followed what was a week from hell for the Health Minister, and the Andrews government. But the real victims are Victorians locked down in a disproportionate fashion more familiar in China.
The consequences of Victoria’s bungled quarantine system, believed to be responsible for the outbreak of community transmission that led to a second COVID wave, could not be more serious: more people dying, untold economic harm to millions of Victorians and damaging the national economy, a dangerous spike in mental health illnesses especially among young Victorians, and negative educational outcomes for many more from stage-four restrictions imposed on Melburnians last week.
Let the independent judge do her job, let the cards fall where they may. I believe there is nothing to fear in seeking the truth. The truth will set you free.
— Jenny Mikakos MP #StayHomeSaveLives (@JennyMikakos) August 8, 2020
Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said what so many Victorians, and millions more across the country, are thinking: it should never have come to this. “Victorians are entitled to know more and get answers,” he said. Even the Prime Minister put some heat on Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews after months of many asking why he seems to be apprehensive about standing up to the Labor leader.
Sadly, no answers have been forthcoming from Andrews about his government’s deadly mismanagement of the hotel quarantine system. And the silence from the disciple of Pericles is even more farcical after Mikakos chose to tweet a dribble of throwaway comments on a platform tailor-made for emotional outbursts, unfounded assertions and glib posturing.
Victoria’s Health Minister told her followers about her admiration for the Ancient Greek statesman, the need to move nimbly during a pandemic, her own tireless work, and the fact that she has “striven to be upfront and measured about the challenges facing us”. “The truth will set you free,” she tweeted.
This kind of guff will impress her partisan followers; that is the point of Twitter, after all. Many are drawn to it, not to glean news or expand their intellectual horizons, but to feel safe in an echo chamber they can dip into every day, even hourly, to inhale the exhaust fumes of views from fellow political travellers. It makes Twitter the perfectly frivolous forum for Mikakos to continue to dodge questions about what she knew and when about the hotel quarantine scandal.
She tweeted that there is a public inquiry under way. Yes, we know that. What Mikakos failed to address is the sharp intervention last week by the retired judge, Jennifer Coate, heading the inquiry. She said that nothing about the inquiry prevents any person, Mikakos and Andrews included, from providing answers right now.
Instead, the Health Minister offered up this: “I’ve worked every day to keep everyone safe. I have put every ounce of energy I’ve had into that effort. If it wasn’t enough, then I’m deeply sorry.”
But what is the point of posting an apology in the Twittersphere except to posture when Mikakos has not been sufficiently “upfront” in the real world of democratic accountability. She could have been upfront when Victoria’s upper house was recalled for one day last week. Yet she refused to answer questions about when she was advised of problems unfolding with hotel security, and when she would release details of genomic testing of Victoria’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 cases. The Health Minister undertook to provide written answers the next day. Except she didn’t do that either.
Mikakos’s resort to Twitter to post a series of tweets that add no answers fits the tawdry approach to accountability by the Labor Premier. Under section 23 (7) of Victoria’s Emergency Management Act, the Premier must report on the state of disaster and the powers exercised under the Act to both houses of parliament as soon as practicable after a state of disaster has been declared. Except his government shut down the lower house sitting last week. These are tactics familiar to the CFMEU, the construction union that pours money into Victorian Labor: never concede, never explain.
What makes it embarrassing for Mikakos is the irony of her hiding from the rigours of democratic accountability on Twitter while extolling the virtues of a man described as the “first citizen of Athens” for founding a form of democracy that encouraged personal freedom, especially freedom of thought and expression. During the Age of Pericles, serious intellects came to the fore, playwrights such as Sophocles and Euripides, sculptors such as Phidias and philosophers who included Protagoras and Socrates. In his famous Funeral Oration speech, recorded by Thucydides, Pericles said “far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive”.
Twitter, a shallow platform that facilitates mindless mob culture, is hardly democracy’s finest moment. And the Andrews government, led by a Premier from the Labor Party’s Socialist Left faction, seems just fine with disproportionate surveillance of its citizens.
Mikakos’s midnight tweets have not addressed mounting questions. As The Age reported early last month, within 24 hours of the March 28 start of the hotel security program, a leaked email from a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions warned the Department of Health and Human Services, charged with leading hotel quarantine, that police were needed at hotels. “We request that Victoria Police is present 24/7 at each hotel starting from this evening. We ask that DHHS urgently make that request as the control agency,” the email read. Another email raised similar concerns with the health department Mikakos oversees.
After fobbing off the issue for weeks, Andrews finally said this on Thursday: “The lines of authority and accountability and exactly what has gone on here, it is not clear … There are questions that cannot be answered and the appropriate thing is to get those answers.” Asked about sections of the media revealing more details about the disaster than him, the Premier said that was of “no concern to me whatsoever”.
It should concern him greatly. It beggars belief that the Premier, and senior ministers involved with managing the pandemic, have not demanded, and received, answers to these basic questions. Andrews is an astute political animal known for his controlling ways. We are entitled to wonder whether he is sitting on information he is refusing to reveal, hoping to ride out this disaster until November when the inquiry will table its report.
Three months is a long time in politics. But Mikakos’s wistful reminiscences about Pericles cannot hide the incompetence and a cover-up. The Andrews government is rotting from the top as it tries to wriggle out of providing answers to Victorians who face the most severe lockdowns seen in this country.
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