Gutless is not a word you normally associate with Daniel Andrews.
But after his government’s Saturday morning dump of a damning report into Victoria’s ambulance call answer performance, it now stands alongside more commonly used words such as arrogant, dictatorial, formidable and relentless.
Given the Victorian Premier’s command-and-control leadership style, it is reasonable to conclude that he signed off on the decision to release the 156-page report on the first weekend of the AFL finals.
In short, the report by the state’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management found at least 33 Victorians died following ambulance failures between December 2020 and last May.
IGEM Tony Pearce identified the potential “adverse events” during the period, which he said were associated with “call answer delays, agency command and control decisions, and/or ambulance resourcing issues”.
“Tragically, 33 of these patients did not survive their emergencies,” Mr Pearce found.
The IGEM report, which the Andrews government has been sitting on for at least three weeks, is one of the most significant reviews of frontline emergency services conducted in years.
All governments “take out the trash” at a time – usually a Friday afternoon – calculated to offer the best chance of limiting fallout from a political problem. It’s a cynical but effective strategy.
But the decision to release such an important review on a Saturday takes this disgraceful tactic to new depths. Compounding the disgrace was the absence of the Premier from its release.
Instead, Emergency Services Minister Jaclyn Symes was pushed out the front door to face the heat.
Mr Andrews often sells himself as being above political games. But Saturday’s appalling episode was political gamesmanship of the worst kind.
One of the most important jobs of any state government is to ensure high-standard emergency health services, but the Andrews government has failed Victorians on this front.
When confronted with the evidence of its own failure, it’s now clear the government’s first instinct wasn’t to brief the public on what went wrong and how they would fix it.
No, this government was focused on saving its own skin by dumping the report on a Saturday, a day when many Victorians were only interested in one event: Geelong v Collingwood at the MCG.
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