Victorian election: trust Team Andrews to fail the character test

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Getty Images

It was Abraham Lincoln who declare­d that democracy is a governm­ent “of the people, by the people, and for the people” — an essential element in this covenant, of course, being trust.

People have to be able to trust their government and that can happen only if the government is forthright with them. Whenever there’s a major issue, people rely on their government to make known all the essential facts. In particular, they have to be confid­ent that facts have not been withheld to protect the government.

For almost a week, the Victor­ian government withheld from the public the fact that the Bourke Street terrorist was on bail at the time he killed Melbourne cafe icon Sisto Malaspina, and then lied about what it knew at the time bail was granted.

This is disgraceful. In the absence of palpable incompetence, such an obvious derelic­tion of duty should make the Andrews government unelectable, especially as no one in the government, from the Premier down, seems to have any grasp of the scale of this betrayal. Or indeed remorse.

It now appears that in the immediate aftermath of Melbourne’s latest terror attack, the Premier and senior ministers were aware that Hassan Khalif Shire Ali was out on bail at the time of his murderous rampage. Yet this information was withheld for six days.

Only when the media managed to hunt through court documents and expose Labor’s latest justice failure did ­Attorney-­General Marti­n Pakula see fit to confirm that the killer had, yet again, been given the benefit of the doubt by a system that appears to operate in the defendant’s favour rather than the community’s.

When questioned as to how and why someone on a terrorist watchlist, whose passport had been cancelled en route to fight with Islamic State, and who had forfeited bail before, was loose in the community, Pakula offered excuses, claiming his authorities would not have been privy to securit­y information from federal agencies.

But it was incompetence rather than ignorance at play here when, three days later, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton was forced to admit that national security agencies had passed all this information on to Victoria Police as a matter of course through the joint counter-terrorism strike team.

So, first there was the cover-up of a critical fact; second, there were Pakula’s misleading comments about what Victoria Police knew (as surely no A-G would be ignorant of how joint counter-terror teams work); and third, there was a lame attempt to blame the fact that a terrorist was free on bail on poor communications between state and federal governments. It’s almost unbelievably shameless, if it wasn’t the Andrews government.

But it gets worse. When asked about the cover-up, instead of admittin­g that his government and his minister badly let down the public, Daniel Andrews accused his critics of attacking the police and brazenl­y insisted, contrary to the facts, that the A-G had “accounted for that matter very, very clearly”. He had not.

The Premier is right that proced­ures should be reviewed after every incident and lessons learned. Where he is dead wrong is in trying to justify the bail cover-up and then trying to shift the blame during an election campaign. It’s a total failure of character, for which he should be utterly condemned.

Yet it’s merely the latest illustration of what an ethically challenged government this is. How can Andrews expect to be taken seriously as being tough on terror and supportive of the police when, on his instructions, ministers are refusing to co-operate with a criminal investigation into the so-called Red Shirts scandal?

Then there’s the consistent failure of the government to admit the reality of African gang violence. There’s the Premier’s long-runnin­g campaign against the volunteers of the Country Fire Authority at the behest of the firefighters’ union, and his appalling treatment of former minister Jane Garrett. And on it goes.

Cancelling the East West Link at a cost of more than $1 billion; tripling coal royalties to make the Hazelwood power station uneconomical; preventing the development of gas resources; and wasting millions on even more subsidies to prop up unreliable renewable power: on every measure, this government flunks the policy test.

But completely failing the character test, that’s far, far worse, and come Saturday it should consig­n this rotten mob to history.

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