Daniel Andrews apologises for triple-0 deaths fiasco

Victoria’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management has poured cold water on one of Daniel Andrews’ key excuses for delaying a report on the deaths of 33 people.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews finally addresses the size of his state’s ambulance crisis on Tuesday. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Victoria’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management has poured cold water on one of Daniel Andrews’ key excuses for waiting until a Saturday in the middle of the AFL football finals to release a report which revealed 33 Victorians had died after waiting too long for an ambulance.

Fronting the media on Tuesday after three days of silence, the Premier claimed IGEM Tony Pearce had been “making cha­nges to this report late last week”.

Asked to respond to the Premier’s claim, Mr Pearce said: “On Wednesday last week there was a single digit in some data in the report that was a typo that was corrected and the report reprinted.”

Mr Pearce said that but for the corrected digit, the document was the “same report” he had handed to the government on August 5.

Mr Andrews earlier apologised to “anybody who’s been touched by” Victoria’s health crisis.

Seeking to blame the Covid pandemic for the deaths – despite clear findings from Mr Pearce that the government had been warned of a lack of surge capacity as long as a decade ago – Mr Andrews partially attributed his failure to front the media over the weekend to his own child’s illness.

Holding a press conference to open a new public surgical centre in Frankston in Melbourne’s outer southeast on Tuesday, the Premier took offence at being asked what he had been doing on Saturday, Sunday and Monday that was more important than ­responding to the issues raised in the report and apologising to the families concerned.

“We’re not getting into these issues of trying to draw an equivalence between my diary and the pain that these families endure today,” the Premier said. “I’m not going to play that game, because it’s not a game. It’s very significant and it’s very serious.

“In terms of what I was doing, I was at home on Saturday, so if you think I was off doing something exotic, I wasn’t. I was at home on Saturday, and I was at home on Sunday.

“On Sunday, I was dealing with a rather sick child. That’s just the fact. I don’t appear every single Sunday. I think I had ­spoken with you the three Sundays before.”

Mr Andrews described the surge in emergency calls detailed in Mr Pearce’s report as a “unique and very, very challenging set of circumstances”.

“I offer my deepest condolences and sympathies and my personal apology – and the apology of the government more broadly – to anybody who has been touched by this,” the Premier said.

“You can’t imagine the pain and the great burden that those families carry with them every single day.

“And we extend those condolences and that apology with a sense of commitment, not only to those individuals, but a commitment to every single Victorian to make the change to make the improvements, the ­investments.

“I would point out that coming into this pandemic event, ESTA (the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority) had met so many of its important benchmarks and in fact exceeded them, so I want to thank the staff for this.”

Mr Andrews claimed there was “no equivalence” between ESTA’s funding system and its inability to respond to what he called an “unprecedented” surge in calls.

In this, he was directly contradicting Mr Pearce’s findings that “in early 2020 ESTA did not have the required budget and contingency funding to recruit significant numbers of additional operational staff for periods longer than three to six months”.

“ESTA missed an opportunity to seek urgent funding from the Victorian government in early to mid-2020, in order to commence the recruitment pipeline for additional operational staff in anticipation of increasing triple-0 demand,” Mr Pearce found.

“These financial constraints proved to be the main cause of ESTA’s inability to develop capacity to meet the scenarios that were played out in the Covid-19 Delta and Omicron waves.”

Mr Pearce found that despite work having begun “more than 10 years ago” to address a funding structure which limits ESTA’s ability to provide adequate staffing during surge events, that work is “yet to be completed”.

Opposition emergency services spokesman Brad Battin accused the Premier of having deliberately evaded scrutiny.

“Daniel Andrews intentionally avoided media this weekend, he intentionally had a report come out about 33 deaths in our state on the day of the biggest (AFL) final in three years – this man is just worrying about a public relations spin,” Mr Battin told Sky News.

“He didn’t actually apologise for ESTA and triple-0. He said he apologised to anyone affected by the Covid crisis.

“He needs to go,” Mr Battin said.

“You can’t continue as premier and have absolutely no care for the 33 families who have lost loved ones, and there will be more.”

Mr Battin said the Andrews government was to blame for the crisis, having “failed to invest in the system” and “consistently ­ignored reports”.

“At every step of the way they’ve avoided scrutiny, they’ve avoided trying to answer the questions, they’ve made no real apologies,” he said.

“It’s more about spin and trying to hide the facts that this government has stuffed up triple-0 for so long and they don’t know how to take responsibility”.