Coronavirus: Time for Daniel Andrews to finally fess up

Chris Eccles, secretary of the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Daniel Andrews fronted the media at 10am on Monday, an hour earlier than usual, and right at the time his top bureaucrat started giving evidence to the hotel quarantine inquiry.

If this was a crass attempt at media management to minimise attention on the evidence of Chris Eccles, secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, it didn’t work as Eccles, more by accident than design, proved he could generate his own headlines.

After an hour of cross-examination, counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachel Ellyard, came to a question that goes to the heart of the inquiry: did he know how a decision was reached that private security would be the “frontier of enforcement” in the hotel quarantine program?
It is a question a conga line of witnesses have been unable to answer and Eccles was no different: “No, I’m not aware.”

Ellyard: “But in your capacity as the head of the public service, can I put this proposition to you: the decision to engage private security ended up employing thousands of people and costing tens of millions of dollars. Shouldn’t we be able to say who made it, as a matter of proper governance?”

The answer is, yes, we should but Eccles chose not to answer in such a straightforward way, instead providing a long response that would have won the deep admiration of the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Noting it was a “really interesting and important question” that went to the issue of “individual and collective decision-making”, he said, as head of the public service, he could “see some legitimacy in the idea of there being collective governance around a matter such as this”.

“If there’s been a failure of an acknowledgment jointly and severally around the decision of the collective then I think that’s a fault or a flaw in the design,” he added, while stressing he was speaking academically, not specifically about the decision to deploy private security.

Ellyard: “If no one knows who made the decision, there’s obviously going to be a risk that no one will understand they have the responsibility for revisiting the decision if time and experience shows that it wasn’t the correct one.

Eccles: “Yes, that’s a very fair point.”

Towards the end of his evidence, Eccles was asked whether he had since become aware as to how the decision to use private security guards was reached. “No, I haven’t,” he said.

Not only did Victoria’s public service head not know who made the decision, he appears not to have tried to find out.

After all the oral evidence, documents, emails and private text exchanges presented to the inquiry, Victorians are entitled to feel deeply frustrated that voters still have not been told who was responsible for the decision to deploy the guards.

Surely Andrews, when he makes his appearance at the inquiry on Wednesday, has to provide the answer.