Mistakes were made

On the final day of hearings for the Victorian inquiry into hotel quarantine, after testimony from more than 50 witnesses, the counsel assisting the inquiry attempted to sum up what had been learnt. Tony Neal QC concluded that no single decision or person caused the failure of the scheme, and that “there was simply not the time to translate a policy into a plan and then realising that plan”. He added, “Bad faith or corruption is not what the evidence shows.” Nevertheless, as counsel assisting Rachel Ellyard told the inquiry, it was “astonishing” that not one senior member of the Victorian government took responsibility – or even claimed to know who was responsible – for the decision to use private security in the quarantine program. 

Jennifer Coate, the former Family Court judge presiding over the hotel quarantine inquiry, will deliver her findings in November, but it seems clear by now that Victoria Police had strongly indicated it didn’t wish for its officers to be frontline enforcers in the quarantine hotels. And the state government didn’t seem to believe that the Australian Defence Force was available to help at the time (or that there was other federal quarantine help). Which left private security.

As Martin McKenzie-Murray points out in the October issue of The Monthly, the private security industry had itself been the subject of an inquiry by the state government, starting in June 2019, after multiple complaints about the unregulated nature of its operations. “Incredibly,” writes McKenzie-Murray, “the very industry that was under state review was the same industry used by the government to principally enforce its hotel quarantine policy.” 

Premier Daniel Andrews landed a large part of the blame for the program’s failures on the shoulders of the health minister, Jenny Mikakos, who promptly resigned, presumably in disgust (and without accepting responsibility for hotel quarantine failures). She must bear some responsibility, but the issues clearly run much deeper than her office.

What has become obvious in recent months is that the running down of the state health department over decades – more so in Victoria than in other states – left it unprepared to deal with a pandemic such as this. The Department of Health and Human Services was incapable of large-scale contact-tracing work. (This was eventually outsourced, out of necessity.) It was also unready for the challenges associated with the lockdown of the nine public housing towers. (A lot of the hard work of coordinating this went to volunteers.) The department had no expertise in setting up quarantine facilities, and one family’s infection was all it took for the virus to spread wildly throughout the city.

News Corp and occasionally the Nine newspapers will try to pin all of the blame on Daniel Andrews because it’s easier to point the finger than admit that you simply won’t have decent public health responses if you keep defunding public services. Oddly, we have yet to hear News Corp calling for more funding for public health.  

It’s also possible to admit that mistakes were made without indulging in idiocies about Dictator Dan or calling for his resignation. Victoria recorded just five new coronavirus cases today, and the massive reduction of infections in just six weeks – rare around the world – hasn’t happened by itself. Despite the mistakes made along the way. 

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