Australia: Victorian Hotel Quarantine Inquiry finds “failure of governance”
The Board of Inquiry into Victoria’s disastrous Hotel Quarantine Program delivered its final report on December 21. Genomic testing has revealed that the state’s second wave of COVID-19, which resulted in 801 deaths and more than 18,000 infections, almost certainly originated in two of the hotels used to quarantine returned travellers.
Predictably, the report is a whitewash. Justice Jennifer Coate’s recommendations call for little more than further investigation “as to the lines of accountability and responsibility between Departmental heads and Ministers.”
Justice Jennifer Coate during the hotel quarantine inquiry (Screenshot from public hearings)
Hotel quarantine inquiry revealed a deep and shocking truth
Opinion
Pru GowardFormer sex discrimination commissioner and MP
December 23, 2020 11.10pm
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The report of the Coate inquiry into the Victorian hotel quarantine system reveals one deep and shocking truth –no, it’s not that no one made a decision about private security guards, it’s that there was no system. Now it is all too late, and the proud Victorian public service, once the benchmark for all others, is having to be told how to put a crisis response plan together. Public administration 101.
The conclusion, that Mr Nobody made a decision to use private security guards in quarantine hotels, is a metaphor for a much wider cultural problem. Premier Andrews has been quick to point this out, so he already knows that real reform will take more than Justice Jennifer Coate’s carefully crafted recommendations for an improved health emergency management system. What her report fundamental
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All political leaders who instinctively blend ruthlessness with their use of power inevitably face a moment of reckoning: is their way becoming too much for the public to bear? Dan Andrews has reached that moment.
If the board of inquiry into Victoria’s hotel quarantine failures had found definitively that specific individuals were directly responsible for the misjudgments that led to the state’s second wave, that would have been bad enough for the Premier, with the subsequent necessary head-loppings and concomitant ill-will.
The government s opaque governing model led to hundreds of deaths and serious economic damage.
Credit:Penny Stephens
Andrews Refuses to Resign Over ‘Lack of Due-Diligence’ in Hotel Quarantine System
In response to the Hotel Quarantine report, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said he would not resign after asserting a “lack of due-diligence” was behind the failures in the government’s quarantining system.
“Our commitment and my commitment as the leader of the government is to learn those lessons. And make sure that an error like this, … that lack of due diligence to check and double-check that things are as they should be, and if a problem is found it is found early rather than found too late,” Andrews told reporters at a press conference on Monday.
Ex-Health Minister Accuses Victorian Premier of ‘Political Deflection’ Amid Calls for His Resignation
Victoria’s former health minister Jenny Mikakos has accused her old boss Labor Premier Daniel Andrews of “political deflection” and said the hotel quarantine inquiry failed to answer key questions.
“I believe Victorians deserve to know the truth about an event that has so profoundly impacted them,” Mikakos said in a statement on Monday night. “They do not need another masterclass in political deflection from the premier.”
Mikakos released her statement hours after the inquiry released its final report into the scandal that led to her resignation.