The coronavirus quarantine buck stops with me, says Daniel Andrews

Daniel Andrews says it is ‘not clear’ who was in charge of his government’s bungled hotel quarantine program, but says he was ultimately accountable.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in Melbourne on Thursday. Picture: Sarah Matray

Daniel Andrews says it is “not clear” who was in charge of his government’s bungled hotel quarantine program, which has been linked to “at least a significant proportion” of Victoria‘s second wave of coronavirus cases.

Declaring he was ultimately accountable, the Victorian Premier maintained that questions about who had made the mistakes that have led to most if not all of a caseload that on Thursday reached 7449 active cases could be answered only by a board of inquiry that is now not due to report its findings until November.

“The lines of authority and accountability and exactly what has gone on here, it is not clear,” Mr Andrews said on Thursday.

“That is why, despite some of the commentary, I just want to be clear with you.

“I set the inquiry up, so I’m fairly well placed to tell you why I did it. I don’t have answers that I am satisfied with. There are questions that cannot be answered, and the appropriate thing is to get those answers, and then, regardless of what those answers are, I will be accountable for those answers, and for any errors, any mistakes, that were made.”

Mr Andrews faced a barrage of questions at a marathon press conference on Thursday, a day after the retired judge he appointed on July 2 to oversee the Hotel Quarantine Board of Inquiry confirmed there was no legal prohibition on the Premier or his ministers answering questions about the matter while the probe is ongoing.

Jennifer Coate’s comments came after Mr Andrews and his ministers have spent the past five weeks batting away questions about their hotel quarantine program by saying they could not comment because they did not want to cut across the inquiry’s work.

When he announced the establishment of the inquiry on June 30, Mr Andrews revealed genomic sequencing had linked “at least a significant proportion” of the state coronavirus caseload to breaches in hotel quarantine that led to dozens of security guards and their close contacts becoming ­infected.

Asked whether he had received advice early on that police, corrections officers or the Australian Defence Force, and not private security contractors, should be looking after people in hotel quarantine, Mr Andrews said he had not.

“No. There’s a decision to establish (the hotel quarantine program), it then gets established, it’s then run by multiple agencies, and beyond that, we can’t be certain, we can’t be sure, we can’t answer many of the very important questions,” Mr Andrews said.

“And that is exactly why we have asked Judge Coate and counsel assisting and all the others who will support her to give us those answers.

“We’re all fundamentally en­titled to those answers.

“I will be accountable for those answers and any mistakes that were made. I’m not for a moment suggesting otherwise.”

The comments came as Victoria recorded 471 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, as well as eight deaths, bringing the state’s death toll since the pandemic began to 170 — 150 of which have occurred since July 5.

Mr Andrews said while he was aware of outbreaks at the Rydges on Swanston and Stamford Plaza quarantine hotels when the Department of Health and Human Services made cases public from May 27 and throughout June, he did not learn until June 30 that the Doherty Institute genomic sequencing had linked those cases to much if not all of Victoria’s caseload.

“I would have been made aware along the way that there had been infections. And that various steps had been taken,” he said. “I don’t think anyone had a sense, certainly I did not have a sense, that we were heading towards a situation where genomic sequencing would confirm at least a significant number of cases had come from that setting.”

Mr Andrews said he was not trying to use the inquiry to avoid accountability. “The judicial inquiry has not been established for the avoidance of scrutiny. Quite the opposite,” he said.

“We don’t have answers to questions that we need answered. That’s why we have an independent process, well-resourced, well-equipped, well-skilled to go and get those answers for us.

“That is the appropriate thing to do. The alternative would’ve been no inquiry — then you would be rightly critical of that.”

He also said there “will come a time” when the government will speak in detail about the issues with the program, because the inquiry will have clarified them.

The board of inquiry on Wednesday had its deadline extended by six weeks, from September 25 to November 6. The delay was ­attributed to Victoria’s stage-four lockdown restrictions on workplaces and the need to therefore conduct the hearings remotely.

Hearings were scheduled to begin on Thursday but have been delayed until August 17.