Coronavirus: Jenny Mikakos grenades lobbed at Daniel Andrews

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and the then health minister Jenny Mikakos at the daily media conference in August. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Convinced she was stitched up by Daniel Andrews, Jenny Mikakos is exacting retribution, sheeting home responsibility for the myriad failings of hotel quarantine to her former boss.

Deeply offended by the Premier’s insistence she be held accountable for the debacle, her explosive final submission to the Coate inquiry has been constructed to inflict significant political damage on Andrews.

Among the political grenades littering her 7000 word submission, Mikakos not only blames Andrews’ subversion of Cabinet processes for the program’s shortcomings, she directly questions the credibility of his evidence about the use of private security guards.

Mikakos argues it is implausible to claim, as was done by counsel assisting the inquiry, that the use of private security guards was not really a decision at all, but a creeping assumption that took hold over a matter of hours.

Jenny Mikakos appears before the hotel quarantine inquiry. Picture: Supplied

Instead, she insists the “weight of the evidence points clearly to an actual decision, not an assumed one” being made during the March 27 national cabinet meeting “or soon after”.

In a pointed choice of words, Mikakos says Coate should “treat with caution” evidence by Andrews when he “sought to explain” why he made mention of private security at a press conference on the same day.

She highlights that no evidence was given to the inquiry about what briefings he got from his own office before he fronted the media.

While Mikakos does not come out and accuse Andrews of lying, she appears keen to leave the impression that he has been economical with the truth.

To his critics, the Mikakos testimony will reinforce their belief Andrews should be held directly and personally responsible for decisions that caused the disastrous second wave, that despite a century of consecutive daily media conferences, he is just another slippery politician.

But Mikakos also feels personally betrayed by Andrews, that she has been scapegoated by him. After he gave evidence holding her accountable for the program’s shortcomings, she not only resigned from Cabinet, she decided to quit parliament.

Her political career is finished, and any hope she has of rehabilitation rests largely with her version of events gaining favour with the inquiry.

With that in mind, her attempt to use her submission to minimise her accountability reads as self-serving.

While claiming to accept she is accountable for the conduct of DHHS, she says the extent of her accountability should be considered “in the context of the shared accountability that was assumed by the DHHS and the DJPR”, and the failure of her department to raise issues with her.

If she was unaware of many critical decisions made when the program was established or first being run, she says, that was not her fault. Nor did she or her department have any role in the “critical decision to use private security in the frontline”. “For those decisions, others must take responsibility,” she says.

But as Arthur Moses, the lawyer representing Unified Security told the inquiry. “Nearly everyone involved in the program understood the DHHS to be responsible for infection and prevention control, apart from, it seems, the DHHS itself.”

Moses says that when Unified Security was contracted to perform security for the program, no one in the Victorian government described the operation as “high risk”, either publicly or behind closed doors. “Not the Premier. Not the former Minister for Health. Nor the officers of their respective Departments,” Moses says. “Success in Government it seems has many parents, but failure remains, stubbornly, an orphan.”

Too true. To ensure the credibility of her inquiry, Jennifer Coate needs to ensure her final report cuts through the buck-passing and gets to the truth. Victorian, stuck in lockdown, deserve nothing less.