Documents suggest top doc failed test

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton. Picture: Ian Currie

The email trail is bad news for Victoria’s Chief Health Officer.

It raises valid questions about not only Brett Sutton’s memory and evidence but his judgment once the March 27 correspondence was exposed by a colleague and the inquiry.

It’s one thing for Sutton to have overlooked a critical email in the pandemic’s darkest hours, quite another for him to then deduce, according to his lawyers, that it didn’t need to be furnished to the board.

Or that once knowing he was to appear before the board, why he didn’t search the word “security” in his emails, which would have produced the relevant document and saved him all this embarrassment.

It is not going too far to suggest the CHO’s position is at serious risk because of the gravity of what he is being accused of. Sutton is no doubt a terrific doctor, but he needs an urgent lesson in political accountability, particularly given that the batch of inquiry emails show that as late as April Fool’s Day at 7.50pm, he was listed as the man in charge of policy and oversight of “people in detention”. In other words, Sutton was then the man at the top of the chain of command for hotel quarantine.

Yet somehow we are meant to accept that he had no idea until May about the use of security guards for the failed system that caused Australia’s second coronavirus wave until May.

Even then, he claimed to read this in the media, a position we now know to be untenable.

Sutton, DHHS and several prominent bureaucrats have a twin problem; first with the evidence and then facing a board of inquiry that is starting to look as cranky as a tiger snake just out of hibernation.

The board’s letter to the DHHS solicitors, MinterEllison, is terse when addressing the failure to produce key evidence. “In our view, on their face, both documents relate to fundamental issues canvassed throughout the board’s inquiry including up until the close of evidence,” board solicitor Will Yates wrote.

The unfortunate part for Sutton is all this news became clear on the day that Victoria marched rapidly towards being relatively COVID-19 free and loosening more of its onerous conditions.

Whatever might be said about the process — and there is much to criticise — Sutton has still helped engineer a stunning turnaround in Australia’s second coronavirus wave.

This result doesn’t ease the legal and political pressure on the CHO or on former chief Victorian bureaucrat Chris Eccles, former chief police commissioner Graham Ashton and incumbent chief health public servant Kym Peake.

They are potentially in the naughty corner with Sutton, being required to provide further statements to the board.

The inquiry itself doesn’t escape scrutiny and former judge Jennifer Coate can’t be seen to be running a kangaroo court. Her reputation hinges in many ways on ensuring that as much as possible the right answers are found. Anything less will be a stain on the Victorian justice and political systems, both of which have had a horrible 2020.