Here we go again. The omni-shambles of Victoria’s response to the pandemic continues apace.
Barely 40 active COVID cases, and the wheels are already falling off the Andrews Labor government’s response: details of exposure sites consistently wrong; massive queues for people to get tested; Victorians locked out of their own state; and Australians from other states locked in hotel quarantine without warning or cause, and in some cases under false pretences.
We had been reassured by Daniel Andrews that all lessons had been learned from the largely useless Coate inquiry into the hotel quarantine fiasco, and the parliamentary inquiry into the contact-tracing failures.
Andrews said in December: “None of us has the ability to change history; we can only learn those lessons and make sure that the reforms and the changes that are essential are made to make it far less likely that these sorts of errors could ever occur again.”
Make no mistake, they have.
Don’t forget that the hotel quarantine errors caused 99 per cent of the 20,000 cases in the second wave between June and October, resulting in 801 deaths.
Andrews boasted Victoria now has “a much-improved contact-tracing system, I think the best in class when it comes to IT, an end-to-end IT solution”. This was despite the parliamentary inquiry finding that “however capable the current contact-tracing solution is, it was not available when the Victorian public needed it. This failure cost lives and was unable to be rectified without strict lockdown measures.”
But our tracking, tracing and testing regime is still a terrible circus, with the long-awaited return of public servants to the CBD having been delayed by a further week, putting more pressure on CBD small businesses that have been doing it so tough for so long.
A Lacoste outlet at the Fountain Gate Shopping Centre, a store that does not exist, was initially declared an exposure site. This was rapidly changed after media attention that it was actually the Lo Costa discount shop.
As reported in The Australian, an alert for the Wonga Estate winery in Strathbogie was issued on January 2. Jeroen Weimar, who has become the public face of Victoria’s response over summer with the no-show of Daniel Andrews, also specifically mentioned the site at his press conference. The only problem is, the Wonga Estate winery doesn’t exist; it was actually the Wyanga winery in Lakes Entrance, five hours’ drive away.
Again on January 2, the European Bier Cafe in Melbourne was listed as a COVID-19 exposure site. Owner Paul Waterson was alerted through the media; he was not contacted by the government. The state government had the dates wrong of the exposure, initially advertising December 21, then changing it to December 28.
Facts matter. That error meant those who were potentially exposed on December 28 didn’t isolate and attended social gatherings on New Year’s Eve.
This is what the government said had been improved. It is an abysmal failure that with so few cases, the Andrews government is making a litany of basic errors.
None more so than the horrendous queues for getting a simple COVID test that takes under five minutes. Why was it taking hours for Victorians to get tested? We had this problem months ago, so why hadn’t sufficient surge capacity been built into the system? Why were people sent away from the testing centre at Albert Park before it was due to open?
Because the government’s contact tracing isn’t up to it. On New Year’s Eve, Victorians holidaying in NSW were given barely 24 hours to return home before a hard border was enforced. Consequently, Victorians who stayed in NSW after the border was shut must remain there until at least the end of January, unless they get a travel exemption.
This is like Eastern Europe in the 1980s, with various communist states arbitrarily closing their borders. It is not dissimilar to the curfew that was enforced on Victorians during the second wave. Is the medical advice for this decision going to be made public? I doubt it, because there isn’t any.
Weimar informed those who pay his wages: “We will only be granting exemptions for people who put in genuine medical, emergency, family, hardship reasons to getback in. There will be conditions applied to those individuals, (including) mandatory hotel quarantine. I sympathise with the people locked out … but we have to take a view about what’s right for the wider Victorian community.”
This is inhumane. Surely, being a resident and taxpayer in the state of Victoria is reason enough to be allowed to return home, with home quarantine requirements for those who have been in red zones?
For those Victorians in Queensland, they were recklessly told to drive through NSW without stopping. Fatigued Victorians, returning from Queensland via car through NSW without a decent break are far more likely to cause a road death than prevent a COVID death.
At the other end of the scale, NSW citizens are banged up in hotel quarantine at Melbourne airport, despite being given an exemption to arrive by Victorian authorities. All Dominic Galati and Zaklina Blazeski want to do is walk the 300m from their hotel jail and get on a flight and return to Sydney. How can this endanger public health in Victoria given that they have both tested negative to coronavirus?
The federal government has changed the words of the national anthem to “one and free”. The irony of that decision being made while so many Australians are locked up, locked out, and severely inconvenienced by state governments, particularly Victoria’s, will not be lost on many of my fellow Australians.
Tim Smith is the member for Kew in the Victorian parliament.