Failure to plan for inevitable the greatest failing of all

The Victorian Government failed in its duty to plan for outbreaks such as the one that has occurred at Cedar Meats — and that failure will affect us all, writes Ed Gannon.

Poorly handled: Not identifying Cedar Meats as being at the centre of the outbreak is just one of many missteps by Victorian authorities. Picture: William West/AFP

HAS the Victorian Government just had its Trump moment?

That moment when, despite plenty of warning, it failed to plan for the inevitable.

The COVID-19 outbreak of 49 cases at the Cedar Meats abattoir in Brooklyn appears to be just that.

The Government should have known something like that was going to happen; it had been told to have protocols in place to prevent food-processing shutdowns; and its release of information to the public was ill-thought-out at best, sneaky at worst.

The refusal of the Government to identify Cedar Meats as the source of the outbreak when it announced it on Saturday had the potential to do enormous damage to the meat industry.

Its argument that it leaves it up to individual businesses to out themselves was incredibly weak.

A significant problem with the failure to identify Cedar Meats was that every other meatworks in Melbourne had to carry the can of possible guilt.

The first rule of defamation is that you need to consider the implication of not naming an offender. In a small community — which the Melbourne meat industry is — doing so tars everyone else who fits the offender’s description.

Rumours ran rampant in the livestock industry on Saturday morning as to what abattoir it was. Abattoir managers genuinely feared they would lose contracts if customers thought it was their organisation.

By Saturday afternoon Cedar Meats emerged as the likely site. By Sunday afternoon it was the only name doing the rounds.

Yet Cedar Meats would not confirm or deny if it was the centre of the outbreak. So much for the government policy.

It took the media to finally lift the lid and identify Cedar Meats late on Sunday.

That should never have happened.

The Government has a greater duty to the community than an individual business.

But it has an even greater duty to prevent such an outbreak in the first place, and to manage the implications if there was an outbreak.

And this is where the greater failure took place.

Five weeks ago The Weekly Times ran a front-page story that raised concerns in the agriculture sector that the Victorian Government had not deemed agriculture an essential service. This was despite Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud saying over and over that it was. The problem was he had no power to actually officially declare it. That is a state government responsibility.

In fact, he said he had told state governments they needed to act.

“To protect Australia’s food supply chains I have previously written to all states and territories to adopt the FZANZ COVID-19 protocols with respect to an outbreak in a facility and would expect those protocols be utilised,” he told The Weekly Times this week.

The April 1 story called for strict protocols to be established specifically for a possible shutdown of abattoirs if there was an outbreak.

Abattoirs are production lines, with many workers standing side-by-side for hours at a time, making them ideal places for a virus to spread.

It is a fact noted by Victoria’s chief medical officer Professor Brett Sutton this week, when he said “meatworks are particularly vulnerable” to coronavirus outbreaks.

“We’ve seen from the US extremely large outbreaks at meatworks,” Prof Sutton said. “In some ways because they are forced to work closer than some other workplaces.”

The calls in early April were for workers to work in small teams, so if there was an outbreak it could be contained to those people, the area cleaned, and the plant could continue to operate.

But despite the industry developing its own protocols, they were unenforceable guidelines.

There were never any overarching rules developed by the state, as there has been for other sectors such as hospitality, or large gatherings. Despite calls on the Victorian agriculture minister Jaclyn Symes to act, there was only silence.

And that failure to act has had an impact on us all.

The failure of the Government to put into place protocols that would have contained the outbreak has most likely put back any change to our coronavirus lockdown laws. Any hope of a relaxation on Monday is now at considerably longer odds.

It is understood that only this week, after the Cedar Meats outbreak, did the Victorian Government start working on protocols for meatworks.

Too little, too late.

Those in power who didn’t act a month ago — despite clear warnings — now carry the blame of a society remaining in paralysis.

• Ed Gannon is Editor of The Weekly Times

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@EdgannonWtn

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