Coronavirus: Better late than never, though Daniel Andrews’s move is really very, very late

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in Melbourne on Tuesday. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Too little too late is the best way to describe the changes Daniel ­Andrews announced on Tuesday.

With the second wave all but brought under control in Victoria — only after hundreds of unnecessary deaths and untold economic destruction — the Premier finally announced his state would decentralise its public health units, thus emulating the far superior contact tracing systems NSW has long deployed.

It would have been nice if And­rews had done that at the beginning of the pandemic. Or even between the first and second waves. Doing so could have contained the rapid spread of the virus through Melbourne that is forcing stage-four lockdowns.

But better late than never.

I first wrote about the problems Victoria was having with contact tracing and its slow and unwieldy centralised public health units back in June. At the time, Andrews was refusing to countenance critic­isms, using the well-worn mantra that he was “getting on with the job” to rebut censure. But that job could have been done so much more successfully if Tuesday’s changes had been enacted months earlier.

One of the great benefits of Australia’s federated system is the capacity of states to learn off one another, to improve practices and avoid repeating mistakes. However, that is only just now happening when it comes to Victoria finally copying the superior contact­ tracing and decentralised public health structures in NSW.

While decentralising Victoria’s public health units was the only concrete change Andrews announced yesterday, there are other valuable signs that he’s fin­ally listening and learning.

Victoria is starting to address its whole apparatus from testing to isolating, in order to decrease the time it takes from symptom onset to isolation. This is a crucial public health focus when it comes to containing the pandemic.

Again, there is a lot it can learn from NSW. Victoria also needs an overall test, trace and isolate strategy that will give the rest of the nation confidence it can adequately cope with any future outbreaks.

However, it is still not exactly clear how Victoria plans to reach into the communities where transmissions have started, to ensure­ the virus is stamped out entirely­. There are also question marks over whether Victoria has the right level of public health experience­ in its ranks — that is, enough experienced outbreak managers to guide the thousands of contact tracers the Premier likes to gloat about.

The appointment of Allen Cheng as Deputy Chief Health Officer in Victoria was a good move, as long as he’s listened to. A failure of Victoria’s public health leadership matrix is how far removed­ from the senior decision-makers Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and his deputies are. In NSW, CHO Kerry Chant sits much higher up the Health Dep­artment’s leadership structure.

At the beginning of this pandemic­,­ I asked then commonwealth chief medical officer Brendan Murphy who he was getting advice from, to help ensure Australia avoid the disasters playing out in Europe and the US.

He immediately raised the name of Cheng, an infectious diseases­ physician and professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at Monash University.

That Andrews has brought him in to help Sutton out can only be a good sign.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.