What's not OK in Other Walks of Life is Fine in Politics

Four years ago during a cricket test in South Africa, television cameras caught Australian fieldsman Cameron Bancroft rubbing the ball with something in his pocket that turned out to be a strip of sandpaper. In the inquiry that followed, it turned out that this was a plan hatched by the Australian vice-captain David Warner to try and rough up one side of the ball to get it to reverse-swing and thereby gain a competitive advantage for his team. The outcome of this action which was contrary to the laws of the game was that Warner, Bancroft and Australian captain Steve Smith were banned from international and state level cricket for a year. Darren Lehmann, the Australian coach at the time, also resigned from his post shortly after the bans were handed down.

Also four years ago, the Banking Royal Commission among other things found that National Australia Bank had continued charging fees to dead superannuation clients. After some initial resistance, the Chief Executive Officer Andrew Thorburn and Chairman Ken Henry eventually tendered their resignations.

In 2020, the headmaster of the Melbourne private catholic school St Kevin's, together with the head of sport, resigned from their posts when it emerged that they had provided character references for an external athletics coach who was subsequently convicted for "grooming" an underage student at the school.

No-one suggested that any of Lehmann or the people from NAB or St Kevin's condoned or in some cases even knew about the matters that led to their resignations. However, they nonetheless understood that as the people in leadership positions, the buck stopped with them and to appease their stakeholders and enable their organisations to move forward from what had happened, they needed to fall on their swords and resign.

On the other hand, there is a stark contrast to what happens in politics. Consider this - in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Victorian government refuses military assistance from the Federal government for its hotel quarantine program, and instead hires a private security firm. It quickly becomes apparent that the firm is ill-equipped for the job, and so while the rest of the country emerges from the initial lockdown and remains largely COVID-free for the rest of 2020, Victoria's programme leaks like a sieve and the state is plunged into a 4 month lockdown. Businesses fail, children miss out on months of schooling, state debt starts to escalate at an alarming rate and worst of all, 800 deaths happened that could have been prevented but for State government hubris.  

When the news breaks about the problems with the quarantine program, the Premier goes on the news and promises to be accountable for his government's actions. However in spite of calls for his resignation as a result of presiding over the most serious administrative cock-up in Victoria's history, he remains in his post. A few months later when an inquiry into the disaster took place, he claimed not to recall who made the decision to engage the private firm and instead of taking responsibility for it himself, he blamed it on the health minister who of course then had to resign. 

Not exactly how "accountability" is defined in the Oxford Dictionary, but no matter, one thinks - if he won't do the honourable and appropriate thing and resign himself, then he'll get his come-uppance at the next election.

Of course though, that's not how things played out yesterday, with the Victorian government being returned with more or less the same majority as 2018. As someone who was brought up understanding the need to take responsibility for one's actions, and who has only ever worked in organisations where malfeasance or incompetence had serious consequences for those concerned, I find this incredibly frustrating and saddening. Because if we don't hold political leaders to account in the same way that we do leaders in other fields, then the country is heading towards a very baleful place.

The pandemic cock-ups are one thing, but in re-electing the Andrews government people also seem to have forgotten or are willing to overlook a whole host of other concerning matters that have gone on in the last 8 years - misappropriating public money for political ends; signing illegal agreements with a hostile foreign power in China; serial lying from both the Premier and senior ministers; multiple IBAC investigations including one involving the Premier himself; launching recklessly into mind-blowingly expensive infrastructure projects of dubious economic benefit; and the concentration of power in the Premier's office at the expense of the due process of the Westminster system of government to name but a few.

People might argue that the Liberal party opposition didn't present a good alternative and maybe that's the case. However as we see all the time in business, sport and other areas outside politics, when leadership changes, organisations find a way to survive, move on and occasionally, thrive. Certainly Cricket Australia , NAB or St Kevin's don't seem any worse off as a result of the changes they made.

However, for better or worse, Victorians elected not to go down that path, and I fear we will be much the worse for it. Having got away with everything he has over the past 8 years with no electoral blowback, how emboldened will the Premier be now to lie, break the rules and deflect scrutiny to his own ends?

I say this because I've seen this script play out before with a long term government. Growing up in Queensland, the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government engaged in all manner of ghastly behaviour before finally being thrown out after 20 years and then having multiple ministers and senior public servants put in jail. 

I just hope that if the voters won't hold the Andrews government to account, then there is a young Tony Fitzgerald clone currently working his way up through the Victorian legal ranks who ultimately will.

My Submission to the Shergold Inquiry on the Management of the Pandemic

 

To the Panel,

First of all, I welcome the fact that an independent inquiry has been established to review the period of the pandemic, and I assume, the conduct of all governments state and federal during this time.

As a resident of Melbourne which bore the brunt of the longest lockdown in the world, I’m aware that our experience was very different to the rest of the country. Nonetheless, given the extreme restrictions that were imposed by governments during the pandemic in what was supposed to be solely for the purpose of protecting the health system, the actions of all require proper scrutiny from a truly independent body, not some hastily convened Kangaroo-court with a limited frame of reference like the Victorian Coate inquiry.

I’ll address some specific matters later in this submission, but as a general observation, if you take the view that the object of the pandemic response was to prevent people in Australia from contracting COVID-19 until such time as vaccines could be developed and administered, and that was pretty much the only thing that mattered in Australian society, then on the metric of hospitalisations and deaths, you would say Australia handled things fairly well.

However, to suggest governments should take this approach to running things is complete nonsense. Even in times of crisis, there are so many other things that governments need to take account of like children’s schooling, people’s ability to earn a living, our relations with other countries, mental health, families who live interstate from each other and not least, public finances, so that they have the capacity to deliver services to their constituents in the future.

Therefore, the different premiers standing up day after day and saying their actions were just determined by the medical advice was an abnegation of the role they were elected to do. Yes, by all means they should take account of the medical advice, but their job as elected officials is not to simply do what a public health officer tells them but to weigh up what they say as well as all the other things they ought to be considering.

Too often the obsession with eradicating COVID at all costs (which itself was a ridiculous aim as COVID-averse places like WA, New Zealand and China are now finding out) led to the sledgehammer approach of repeated lockdowns, the repercussions of which will be felt for years. Of course, this is a very polarising issue and there will be many people who agree with the COVID-zero approach taken. However, that certainly wasn’t the approach taken by most other developed countries, and after having both (a) observed the effect 291 days of lockdown had on Melbourne; and (b) recently travelled to the UK and Ireland and seen how they are managing COVID, I’m certainly not convinced.

Leaving aside however the relative merits of the Australian approach, I have 3 specific areas of complaint that I would like to highlight to the panel.

The first concerns the closing of the international border to outbound travellers. If the whole point of closing the border is to try and prevent COVID-19 from entering the country, I fail to understand how someone leaving the country represents a health risk to Australians. Also, if a citizen has things to attend to overseas and a foreign country is happy to let them go there, then what business is it of the Australian government to try and stop them?

The second concerns the lack of a consistent national approach to the handling of the pandemic and the hi-jacking of the response by the states, some of which had premiers who cynically exploited the situation for electoral gain. Of course, the Federal government has a lot of culpability here. I think it was Winston Churchill who said, “never waste a good crisis” but this is precisely what they did. When confronted with a virus that isn’t constrained by either state or international borders, and knowing that federal money would be needed in order for the states to stay economically afloat, the federal government missed a golden opportunity to take charge and transfer power away from what in the modern world is an entirely regressive and more or less obsolete level of government. By not insisting on a nationally co-ordinated response in exchange for pandemic relief, the state governments were free to run amok, gleefully fanning jingoistic state rivalries and imposing a bunch of entry rules that often were inconsistent and more often, simply cruel to families separated by arbitrary state borders.

Aside from being unable to visit my elderly mother for the best part of 2 years, in mid-2021 I experienced first hand the sort of idiocy that happens when each state makes its own rules. On a rare occasion where Victoria had shut to parts of Queensland as opposed to the other way around, I was able to go the Gold Coast for business, but if I set foot in Brisbane, I would have to quarantine for 2 weeks on my return. However, at the same time, anyone who lived in Brisbane was able to travel freely to the Gold Coast while I was there and presumably, infect me with COVID-19. This sort of thing is exactly why a national approach is needed to pandemics. It would also stop the 2 levels of government trying to blame each other for things like nursing home deaths, quarantine facilities and vaccine rollouts because the buck would stop with one level of government.

The third and final objection relates to the deliberate actions and stuff ups by state and federal governments during the period of the pandemic which needlessly prolonged both the pandemic and lockdowns. As you would be aware, the conditions of lockdown imposed by state governments were incredibly severe. You could only leave your house for four reasons, and even then for 2 hours a day (in the case of Victoria you couldn’t even do that after 9pm), and when you did leave you were forbidden from going more than 5 km from home let alone interstate or overseas.

You couldn’t visit friends or relatives, all the shops and restaurants were shut, you had to home-school your children, you had to wear a mask every time you did leave your house, and if you so much as sneezed the government required you to go queue in a line, sometimes for hours, in order to get tested.

Therefore, given the extreme measures the government were requiring its citizens to take, surely in return those same citizens were entitled to expect that governments would leave no stone unturned to manage the pandemic properly so that the prison-like restrictions could be removed as soon as possible. But no, instead here are just a few examples of them not doing this: 

• In WA, the government allowed weddings to be held in quarantine hotels

• In NSW, after vaccines were available, the government let unvaccinated drivers ferry quarantine travellers to their accommodation, one of whom started a cluster than shut down NSW and Victoria for 4 months last year

• The federal government failed to diversify its vaccine supply, so when the Chief Medical Officer in Queensland went on the television and deliberately destroyed public confidence in the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the rollout was delayed until such time as further Pfizer vaccines could be sourced – and therefore prolonged the 2021 lockdowns in our 2 biggest states

• In Victoria, the government refused help from the military to run hotel quarantine, and instead engaged a private contracting firm, whose staff both fornicated with quarantine guests and allowed them to leave their rooms at will. When questioned about this at the Coate enquiry, the Chief Medical Officer said he didn’t think it was important that he read the email about who to engage on quarantine, and the premier claimed not to remember who made the decision.

It's simply not good enough, and if God forbid this happens again, a few things need to change.

We need a thorough review of lockdown measures, and whether there is a better way to contain the next pandemic which doesn’t involve a complete shutdown of society.

We need a national approach, as the one adopted last time led to vastly unfair and inconsistent outcomes depending on where you happen to live, and viruses don’t tend to pay heed to arbitrary lines on a map.

We need to be better prepared with proper quarantine facilities, and not use hotels which proved time and again they weren’t fit for purpose.

And most of all, we need people in charge who know what they are doing and can manage things properly, not a bunch of provincial politicians who keep messing things up and seem more interested going on TV for 120 days in a row to lecture everyone instead of fixing the problem.

I wish you well with the conduct of your inquiry.