While 2020 in particular, and recent years more generally, have demanded routine adjustments to what is considered “normal” in politics, the behaviour of the Andrews government in Victoria remains extraordinary.
That responsibility for key decisions in the hotel quarantine debacle remains diffused through political, bureaucratic and operational levels, with no person or persons seemingly having made decisions that led to a massive disease outbreak and hundreds of deaths, defies common sense and the basics of public accountability.
Andrews’ health minister Jenny Mikakos has resigned after Andrews in essence blamed her last week, but she insists she was completely unaware of the use of private security guards in quarantine — let alone responsible for the decision to use them. By her own lights, it’s entirely unclear why Mikakos actually resigned — particularly given her own department failed to brief her on key issues.
“Victorians deserve to know who [decided to use private security guards]” , she said in her resignation statement. Indeed. And, she insists, it wasn’t her.
Andrews has repeatedly used the inquiry he established into the bungle as an excuse to avoid questions about who was responsible, only for the inquiry to devolve into a stream of witnesses professing to not know who made crucial decisions.
As counsel assisting said to Andrews last week, “no one is claiming ownership of the decision, even though no one seems to have spoken against it at the time and no one who might have been the decision-maker seems to suggest if it had been them, it would have been a bad decision. There is just no one”.
The Andrews government is by no means alone in its reluctance to accept responsibility. There are a slew of Morrison government ministers — Angus Taylor, Alan Tudge, Richard Colbeck, for starters — who should have already been sacked for incompetence and much worse. Prominent bureaucrats preside over serial scandals and bungling in the departments without consequence.
But a collective evasion of responsibility for a decision that led indirectly to the death of hundreds and economic catastrophe for Victoria is on a different scale altogether.
But Andrews is also seeking to dramatically extend his government’s powers. Already overseeing the most draconian, and absurd, attacks on basic rights during Australia’s pandemic — learner drivers fined, mobile CCTV, Facebook posters handcuffed in their own homes, number plate recognition technology deployed to track motorists — Andrews proposes new legislation to allow warrantless searches, arbitrary detention and the handing of greater power to untrained officials.
The only check on such extraordinary powers is political in nature: that ministers are ultimately responsible for what occurs in their departments, that officials have to answer to parliament for the decisions they have made.
But there can be no check when no one is responsible, when even an independent inquiry is fobbed off with excuses that it was someone else’s decision, and the identity of that someone isn’t clear, or when a minister might quit — these days a vanishingly rare event — but insist someone else was at fault.
There’s also a real question about exactly how useful such powers would be even accepting that such flagrant breaches of basic rights are justified by the pandemic. In the case of Victoria, the new powers come on top of an already severe crackdown by the state on ordinary citizens.
As economist Saul Eslake has forensically shown, Victoria has in recent years been far and away the leading state for fining its own citizens, extracting 25% more in fines for alleged breaches of the law and regulations than the next most punitive state, Queensland.
Daniel Andrews continued this reliance on fines into the pandemic, Eslake shows: per capita, Victorians were fined more than twice as much per capita as citizens anywhere else in Australia (and around six times as much as people in NSW) in the period to the end of May i.e. before the more recent lockdown. Clearly, that didn’t prevent the disastrous second wave of infection.
The Andrews government was already demanding and using greater powers of state intervention in the lives of its citizens than any other government. Given the lack of interest at senior levels in accepting responsibility when power is misused, there’s hardly a case for any greater powers.
This seems to be full of misleading assumptions, for using private firms and contractors is the normal Federal approach, giving conservative donors a cash in chance and government operatives ever more dodge room. Even Nauru’s quasi concentration camp has private contract security, not defence personnel which is un-or under-trained. Conservative donors own and run these companies, with cost cutting, minimal training and expenditure on equipment. It’s Murdoch’s maggoty media barking for pressure, but never at federal negligence as in old folk’s homes, run by the same or similar profiteering conservative donors. People, especially security staff and managers, have let down us, Victoria, its government, its rights. Human wilfulness, or is it criminality? A clean up of the incompetent and wilful crooks in federal cabinet might be a good example, so up against a wall, now…
I think you’re right. All this talk of “a collective evasion of responsibility for a decision” and so on presumes that the use of private security could only have resulted from a specific decision. It looks much more probable that the Victorian government just followed its procedure, or custom and practice for all such work, without any conscious consideration or debate of any other option. This isn’t great, but it’s far from being so sinister or mysterious as so many commentators make out.
I agree. I think the decision to use private security firms was far from being sinister or mysterious – it was normal practice being adhered to. Similar decisions seem to have been made in other states.
It would be far better to concentrate on the very high costs of these privatised arrangements and the appalling delivery of levels of service commensurate with these charges.
Perhaps the deaths of refugees in off-shore camps should have sharpened our critical observation skills.
I agree too. And it seems to me that focussing on the question of who authorised the use of private security is a wasted question and a misdirection.
Further, I actually think that it would be a misuse of police resources to use them for the function of guarding those in quarantine. I guess the Government could have used prison guards but that would not have been a good look.
It does sound though that the Government Department responsible did not determine whether the selected companies actually had the capacity to deliver the required staffing and service quality. Human error under pressing circumstances most likely (no risk assessment undertaken) – in some contexts it might not have been an issue, unfortunately it was in this case.
Spot-on, Rat. The ‘mindset’ operating in the ‘system’ would not have considered any alternative, nor would it have seen any need to. If it hadn’t been for a couple of badly trained, negligent ‘guards’ and recalcitrant ‘returnees’, the government and the public servants might have got away with it.
Only one state made this decision and what a disaster. The other states knew better, why not Victoria?
You and I and everyone has been let down, a “disaster”, by corporate profiteering crooks running understaffed and paid, undertrained security firms. Conservative criminality…
I thought that nsw used he same system, but with a layer of oversight. Surely returned travellers shouldn’t have needed ‘guarding’, rights without responsibilities apparently.
The whole point is: it WASN’T exactly sinister. It was a very intimate and close relationship between Victoria Police and Dan Andrews (or his Chief of Staff). A relationship that is TOO close if you ask me.
The Victoria Police Chief abdicated responsibility immediately. “Protect and Serve”? I don’t think so, mate.
Who knows what was said in that six minutes between Graham Ashton saying “what the hell?” and saying “Private Security are doing it”. But it clearly was a phone call between him and Dan’s right hand man in Premier and Cabinet.
How about this for an possible account:
G.A “there’s no way I’m throwing my members under the bus to monitor this thing, mate, and come election time, I’m going to start telling the Inspectors of all the stations to INCLUDE family violence assaults in the statistics which will be released on time”
“right, right, sorry, it’s okay Grah, mate… calm down… how about if we outsource.. yeah, how about that?”
I’d expect to read something like this from a Sky journalist, not Crikey. This is an ad hominem attack which does not take into account the dire necessity to organise so-called quarantine operations virtually on the run, where confusion and lack of historical ‘protocols’ ruled the roost. You had Scomo quacking like a rubber duck from Canberra, you had the government of Australia allowing the Ruby Princess to dock and empty its covid load onto Australia – a situation for which nobody has taken one % of responsibility for – and you had the mixed messages from Scomo about the use of ADF, and you had the disastrous consequences of using untrained staff to do a job paramedics should have done. Sure, mistakes were made: mistakes in these abnormal times are not only human, but in the circumstances, bloody inevitable. So, go ahead, blame Dictator Dan, take the Sam Newman and Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones option, blame instead of trying to understand how urgent the situation was.
Crikey’s slow drift rightwards seems to be something it is unaware of.
I assumed that to be entirely intentional and consistent with the general decline of the last several years.
Since Jonathan Green ceased to be editor, if memory serves.
Oh for a Nation Review and reporters of Mungo MacCallum’s perspicacity & probity.
If Crikey did not investigate all parties I would not want to subscribe.
You forgot to mention the rich Australians returning from Aspen, & going back to their leafy Melbourne Suburbs without the need for self-isolation.
Sadly, this country has always been run on blood lines. And any objective thought is frowned upon, sledged, sneered and jeered at. Just because BK has different opinion to the proleteriat here, doesn’t make him morally or politically corrupt as is being suggested.
That really is juvenile.
While I don’t like drum beating and flag waving from “the right”, I find it curious that some contributors here are just as rabid as the people they lampoon.
I just cannot believe you think that looking with open eyes at something is an attack and therefore means that he is ‘right wing’.
It seems we are going down the road of America. Where you are either with one side or the other and you cannot use your critical faculties to intelligently investigate both.
I think it is the actual opposite. The journalist is doing a good job of being an investigative reporter.
Are you saying that if someone is left wing they can do no wrong? Are you saying that Dan is the bees knees because he is not the Liberal Party?
In Victoria, Ghengis Khan would be a tree-hugging bleeding-heart leftie in comparison to the Coalition Parties.
This is the kind of so-called unbiased reporting I’d expect from Sky.
On the contrary, for once BK gets it right.
So, to have an independent inquiry is trying to hide something. Should Andrews then have followed the federal government approach and held an internal inquiry that doesn’t ask anyone any questions and always comes out with a not guilty result? If Andrews had commented on the inquiry during its course he would have been accused of trying to influence it. From what I have seen the lawyers involved in the inquiry have spared no one, it’s all out there for everyone to see.
Except while the inquiry was going, Dan said that the virus had gotten out because of “large families in the outer suburbs”.
Subtle little dog whistle there.
Not “because of large families” but as a consequence of a couple of families forming a cluster.
Nice case of selective reading and ignorance of context.
Oh dear another Keane diatribe against Andrews or Labor or both. But surely BK is targeting the wrong people?
Many in business know that the quality of security guards is not of the highest standard, the adage you pay peanuts..etc comes to mind.
It is highly likely that the Government wasn’t paying peanuts, it was the poor casual workers at the end of the money trail who were paid poorly. So who is responsible? Well, how about the three service providers, and the sub contractors who they employed for starters. No doubt a few companies have done very well from delivering an appalling and deadly service, it was criminal neglect and they should be charged with manslaughter!
Elements of truth to this. But I still think the decision to use private security was negligence. The government know exactly the sorry state of the private security industry.
Even more ignorant and childish rubbish. Thje federal government, for cheapness and to pay out bumboy donors, uses private security firms in Nauru, and no ADF people at all.
It is standard practice across the whole of the country.
Bernard’s had it in for Andrews since before the 2018 election, obsessed with a “this is a dud government” narrative while fawning over the Berejiklian (#koalakiller) government – exposed as riddled with corruption and also not averse to heavy handed policing and restrictions on civil liberties- to a bizarre degree.
I agree with the criticisms of aspects of the new Omnibus Bill. The Law Institute has raised justifiable concerns. I take no issue with that part of this piece. There are legitimate concerns about the risk of government overreach and excessive police powers being used disproportionately against marginalised communities.
But with respect to the swipes about the private security decision and so on, no one in the media joining in the pile-on has proffered any coherent explanation of how they, or Mumbles O’Brien’s opposition, could have done better. Why aren’t they holding the profiteers in the industry, who pay their workers a pittance and didn’t provide proper training or equipment, to account? It’s getting old. The Murdoch press in particular is simultaneously pushing a ludicrous line that COVID is not that bad and we should open up and let it rip (because it’s just old people who need to take one for the team in service of the Great God Economy – all lives matter only when it’s convenient, isn’t that right, Chris Uhlmann?) and weaponising the deaths, to obscure any focus on the repeated evidence of corruption and incompetence on the part of the Morrison government.
As a Victorian living under these restrictions – I haven’t so much as hugged or shaken hands with another human being for six months, and I’m starting to struggle with the isolation – THIS IS NOT HELPING. YOU ARE NOT HELPING. Yes, there were stuffups as there are in every government because governments are tun by flawed human beings that make mistakes. Yes, the Victorian government should own their mistakes and fix them. Yes, excessively violent arrests of protesters are indefensible. Yes, the curfew was over the top and so are the fines. All those are valid points of criticism.
But it would be really nice to see BK and his counterparts at the Oz, Age, Herald-Sun, ABC and other commercial media, along with Victorian and Federal Liberal MPs, take a break from the constant barrage of negativity and thank US for once. Because you’re welcome.
I agree with much you have to say, and maybe, it is because I don’t read the Australian, the Age, or the Herald Sun that I am not aware of the ‘constant barrage of negativity’ being served.
However, I think there is a story here about representative democracy.. it won’t work if we don’t make people responsible for their mistakes… and about laws being written during drastic times which infringe on our freedoms.
Personally, I think the FEDS are to blame because they are in charge of Quarantine. They should have handled it.
However, it is clear that a big mistake was made in Victoria and being able to say it does NOT make someone pro – rightwing or pro liberal.
We should be able to critically evaluate both sides of politics regardless. Not just be blindly supportive of the side we vote for.
Likewise, May Muldoon, is is unjust to endlessly criticise your elected representatives in government without mentioning the fundamental causes of the problems which have been, in this matter, irresponsible private companies, immature individuals, heavily biased news outlets, self-serving business associations, and political manouevering by the Coalition Parties which, had their demands been acceded to, would have put us in the same basket as the USofA and the UK now find themselves.