Finally, one person at least in the Victorian government has remembered something. A strange, COVID-induced amnesia had otherwise spread through Victoria’s government and bureaucracy as they were called to front the Coates Inquiry into the botched hotel quarantine program which unleashed a wave of infections and deaths. The inquiry has been subject to a litany of “I don’t know”, “I can’t remember”, “can’t recall”…it’s as if a pack of COVID-infected dogs ate the collective homework of Victoria’s governing class.
And nobody – not one single person – is willing to admit that they were responsible for the decision to use private security guards instead of police or the ADF, or even that they could possibly identify who was.
Until now. Sort of.
Health Minister Jenny Mikakos was, you might have thought, right up there in the chain of decision-making. After all, this was a public health issue. Certainly, when it came time to offer up a sacrificial lamb, it was Mikakos’s head which rolled across the carpet.
But Mikakos has told the Coates inquiry what was already common knowledge: the Andrews government is not a normal Westminster government.
Former Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos has blamed Daniel Andrews’ subversion of Cabinet processes for the hotel quarantine program’s failings.
Andrews is well-known as a control freak who runs government with dictatorial reach. Which, of course, makes his claims to “know nuzzink” about the hotel quarantine scheme even more ludicrous.
In an explosive final submission to the inquiry published on Friday, Ms Mikakos said the haste with which the program was set up saw “usual Cabinet processes subverted” with the Premier, through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, giving responsibility for the scheme’s design and implementation to Job Minister Martin Pakula’s department.
She said ordinary decision-making mechanisms, lines of accountability and reporting had been supplanted by the Premier’s introduction of the Crisis Council of Cabinet, which replaced ordinary Cabinet Committees and processes, and reorganised key aspects of the Victorian public service.
Ms Mikakos said the fact that no Cabinet or Cabinet Committee process was engaged for the setting up of the Hotel Quarantine Program is “the root cause of some of the issues which have been ventilated before the board in the course of this Inquiry.
“In particular, the failure to follow ordinary Cabinet-led decision-making processes is the cause of the differing views which have been given by witnesses as to who had overall responsibility and accountability for the Hotel Quarantine Program,” she said.
This could easily be dismissed as just sour grapes from a sacked minister, except for the fact that it not only chimes in with what was already known about the functioning of the Andrews government (the premier’s office alone has more staff than the public health department), but rings some concerning bells when taken in context of earlier testimony by former police commissioner Graham Ashton.
Ashton’s evidence and mobile phone records indicate that the disastrous decision to use private security at quarantine hotels, rather than Victoria Police, Australian Federal Police (AFP) or the ADF (as had been done in every other state) was made some time between 1:12pm and 1:22pm on Friday, March 27. In that time, Ashton went from frantically querying if AFP would run security to answering his own question: “Mate my advise [sic] is that[…]private security will be used”. Answering the AFP commissioner’s surprised response, Ashton says “I think that’s the deal set up by our DPC” (Department of Premier and Cabinet).
So far, no one within the DPC is taking responsibility. The head of the public service and the Emergency Management Commissioner have both denied responsibility. The premier, incredibly, denies any knowledge at all of the decision.
But, as Mikakos says, this decision to bypass the normal operations of government has had disastrous consequences. More specifically, Mikakos has bluntly told the Coates inquiry that Daniel Andrews’s denials should be “treat[ed] with caution”.
Mikakos might be a minister scorned by her leader, but that doesn’t mean that her evidence should be discounted. Especially not when it fits so well with what we already know.
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