I don’t recall. No, those meeting notes with my name do not jog my memory. The decision to use security guards was already made, I don’t know by who. That was not my responsibility. I heard something about the ADF, but I don’t recall what.
Each senior figure speaking before the hotel quarantine inquiry should be made to read the transcript of their evidence and donate a considerable sum from their handsome taxpayer-funded salaries to the victims of this disaster for every time they used a version of those words.
Hundreds of Victorians have died. Thousands of businesses have collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of Victorians have lost their jobs.
The people entrusted to navigate Victoria through this pandemic steered it onto the rocks of the second wave — and are now they obfuscate, buck pass, dissemble and perhaps even lie under oath. It is a conga line of incompetence, insincerity and insensitivity. And it is a gross insult to the families who have lost loved ones because of them.
Premier Daniel Andrews has hidden behind this inquiry each time he’s been asked about the catastrophic decisions made by his government in the establishment and running of the hotel quarantine program. He has hidden behind the inquiry even when the former judge running it made it clear there was nothing stopping him talking about it.
He promised Victorians that the inquiry would get to the bottom of what had occurred, which he conceded had involved grave mistakes that led to the devastating second wave and heartbreaking loss of life.
Adding insult to grotesque injury, the most senior witnesses to the inquiry this week have been a pantomime of amnesia, bureau-babble and cowardice.
From the secretary of the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet Chris Eccles saying he sometimes had no recollection from meetings he had chaired, to the forgetful police commissioners (past and present) who couldn’t remember what notes they wrote at the meetings.
We’ve had three senior ministers say repeatedly that they weren’t aware of matters within their portfolios and didn’t seek to ask any questions about them.
We’ve had a cringeworthy performance from the Secretary of the Department of Health which has left everybody reeling at the fact that she is in charge of our entire health system, let alone the pandemic response.
We’ve had spaghetti bowl organisational charts and utopian mission statements. We’ve had emergency management plans with more acronyms than a United Nations summit.
But nobody — not a single person — has said they were responsible for the decision to use private security guards instead of police or the ADF, or that they could possibly identify who was.
It’s beyond farce. It’s beyond an embarrassment. It is undisguised contempt for Victorians. It insults our dead and compounds their families’ grief.
The Andrews government caused this second wave. And it’s now clear how it happened when you see the calibre and character of the people in charge. They reflect the character and calibre of the bloke who put them there.
There is no honour in these people and the person who leads them. They have no interest in easing the pain of Victorians. They have no interest in giving grieving families answers, or devastated business owners the truth about why a lifetime’s work has been sacrificed.
They are just out to save themselves. That none is accepting responsibility for the greatest public policy failure in living memory means everybody must. Starting from the top.
But Andrews can redeem himself on Friday by doing what a true leader should: accept responsibility, and apologise to Victorians. Then show he means both by relinquishing his position and gracefully exiting Victorians’ lives. The deaths have been too many, the destruction too great, and his culpability too deep for any other course of action.