No doubt Premier Daniel Andrews is hoping that gratitude for reopened shops and restaurants will wipe away memories of why Melburnians had to endure nearly four months of house arrest. And lest the Coate inquiry remind people of how it was his government’s culpable incompetence at quarantining, testing and tracing that made the lockdown necessary, its final report has now been moved to December 21, when it will be buried by Christmas.
If Jennifer Coate were trying to let the Premier off the hook for more than 800 deaths, tens of thousands of lost jobs and billions of dollars in economic damage, she could hardly have contrived things better.
Two days ago, Andrews flagged that international travellers would start coming back to Victoria before Christmas, using Coate’s interim report due next Friday to identify all the quarantine problems and how to fix them. But I have no confidence that Coate can come close to doing this properly given the paucity of evidence, the conflicting testimony, the collective amnesia — and, most of all, the people I’ve now spoken to who ran the security in these hotels who have never been called as witnesses even after willingly providing statements and documents.
Given the hell from which Victoria is only just emerging, it beggars belief that the Premier would want to restart a system that put the state into deadly peril before we properly know what went wrong in the first place, especially when the inquiry that’s supposed to tell us seems almost wilfully determined not to find out.
We know that at least 99 per cent of Victoria’s second wave originated from bungled hotel quarantine. We know that Victoria’s testing and tracing regime was completely shambolic compared to NSW’s, which is why just a handful of cases exploded into a statewide catastrophe.
What we don’t know is why the lion’s share of the hotel quarantine work was given to a private security firm that wasn’t on the preferred provider list, and why other companies linked to the majority owner, David Millward, had previously gone into administration owing creditors millions of dollars.
Remarkably, this firm, Unified Security, secured a $30m contract on the basis of a few phone calls and text messages over several hours on the morning of Saturday March 28; it was not even on the government’s vetted list of approved suppliers.
Only days earlier, the Victorian Government Purchasing Board, the state’s independent procurement watchdog, had put officials on notice about “the increased risk of unscrupulous and ill-prepared suppliers” and warned in particular to “be vigilant” about the use of new suppliers.
Within a couple of days of the Unified contract getting the go-ahead, probity officials at the Jobs Department were raising red flags, troubled by the lack of a transparent process and gravely concerned that this deal exposed the government to serious risk. There was even a suggestion that the contract be unwound.
Incredibly, the Coate inquiry never grilled the Jobs Department head on who authorised this deal; Unified Security’s Millward never gave testimony under oath; and the Jobs Department officer involved in the contract never appeared as a witness. Even more alarming, the inquiry never called a number of the other private security subcontractors associated with Unified who could testify as to how money was handled and how quarantine was actually run, even though they’d volunteered to appear.
This is all on top of the inquiry’s earlier failure to call the Premier’s chief of staff, its failure to seek phone records; and its almost inexplicable failure to recall both the Premier and the former health minister after Jenny Mikakos resigned saying that she “strongly disagreed” with Andrews’ sworn testimony.
The inquiry’s almost ludicrous preliminary conclusion — via counsel assisting’s closing submission — that no one was actually to blame for the decision to use private security (it had just been a “creeping assumption”) — is now blown out of the water by what has been exposed over the past few weeks. It sharpens my criticism of counsel’s unfathomable failure to grill the Premier on his insistence that military help had never been available for hotel quarantine despite his earlier public welcome of it. Plus, its pathetic acceptance at face value of a parade of ministers and officials saying that they couldn’t remember and didn’t know anything about how key decisions had come to be made just highlights how much work this inquiry hasn’t done; and, I fear, won’t do.
Belatedly, the inquiry has called for further statements from key decision-makers, including the Premier. But this is just via affidavit — signed and sworn, sure — but carefully drafted by lawyers to be consistent with earlier denials and evasions.
What must happen — if there is to be any justice for the dead, their families and every Victorian who has lived the hell of this second wave — is that hearings are reopened, witnesses recalled and cross-examined, and “missing” evidence made public.
Without this, the Coate inquiry’s final report won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on and none of us will ever know the truth about the greatest governmental disaster in recent Australian history.
Peta Credlin’s special investigation, Deadly Decisions: Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Catastrophe, is on Sky News on Sunday at 8pm AEDT.
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