Ruby Princess coronavirus debacle: It’s an occupational Hazzard for whom the buck stops

Epidemiologist Kelly-Anne Ressler (left) and NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard.

This time 20 years ago, Brad Hazzard was a lesser light in an opposition with few bright sparks, passing largely unnoticed as NSW spokesman for community ser­vices while his hapless parliamentary team squabbled and backstabbed its way through four leaders in record time.

One of the few occasions Hazzard shot to prominence was when he made a claim so ridiculous and tasteless that it caused outrage even on Macquarie Street.

It is worth revisiting two decades on as it says much about the standards of accountability he demanded in opposition and the standards by which he now abides as Health Minister in the Berejik­lian government.

Faye Lo Po.

During a child protection scandal, Hazzard demanded the resignation of DOCS minister Faye Lo Po, making the remarkable claim she “doesn’t care if children die”.

As bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph, I remember talking to several Liberal MPs disgusted and embarrassed by Hazzard’s statement, which was so over the top that it afforded the Carr government a chance (yet again) to govern largely unchallenged.

Fast forward two decades and Hazzard, the man who believed ministers were personally responsible for the death of children at the hands of deadbeat parents, is turning on a clinic in the avoidance of ministerial responsibility.

When it comes to the Ruby Princess fiasco and the role of Hazzard’s own department, NSW Health, in managing the crisis, the minister’s motto is the buck stops anywhere but here. It’s an ethos reinforced by his boss, with the sneaky attempts by Gladys Berejiklian to fit up the feds for the handling of the cruise ship debacle, in comments that were leaked from within the partyroom to this newspaper by MPs appalled by the Premier’s blame-shifting.

The scenes out of the NSW government’s sham inquiry into the Ruby Princess this week were harrowing and disgraceful.

The manner in which that poor public servant, epidemiologist Kelly-Anne Ressler, was reduced to tears during her interrogation by Bret Walker SC was beyond ­belief.

It is debatable whether this woman should have appeared ­before the inquest at all.

As our NSW bureau chief, Yoni Bashan, wrote yesterday: “She was not on the four-person panel that graded the ship a ‘low risk’ for entry to Australia; she did not write the inch-thick guidelines governing cruise ship arrivals; and she was not a medical doctor qualified to give clinical ­advice.”

Yet Ressler ended up wearing a day’s worth of vitriol all the same.

Let’s be clear. The treatment of this woman was an act of state-sponsored bastardry designed to ensure that whatever villains are found in this affair do not inhabit NSW cabinet.

It’s a taxpayer-funded show trial aimed at achieving a political end.

It was Hazzard who ultimately had the power to demand greater vigilance and oversight by his own department in managing the Ruby Princess. Despite the best efforts of lefties on Twitter — and some NSW Liberal moderates, you would suspect — to suggest otherwise, it has nothing to do with the Australian Border Force, which isn’t a health body at all and only ever acted on the basis of advice from Hazzard’s department.

In the Westminster system, the buck stops with the minister — the same minister who’s been failing to exercise his absolute power to get those poor elderly people out of the Newmarch House aged-care home in western Sydney, where they’re dropping like nine pins while Hazzard says he understands/is advised/has been told that everything that can be done is being done.

I’m certainly not saying he doesn’t care whether people die. You’d have to have a screw loose to make such an accusation.

But with all the deaths that have been happening in NSW, you can add ministerial accountability to the list of fatalities.