As I wrote recently, US Senator Josh Hawley’s epic takedown of Anthony Fauci in a Congressional hearing might not be the justice we deserve for the enormities of the Covid class, but it was a joy to watch. It’s also about all we’re likely to get, in the way of justice. The Covid class are adroit at covering their own arses, if nothing else. Certainly much better than they are at epidemiology, given how ludicrously wrong their hysterical claims about Covid turned out to be.
Not to mention their ‘expert advice’ that was not just wrong, but wrong on stilts. After all, if lockdowns and mask mandates really worked (which we knew even before the pandemic that they did not), the most locked-down place in Australia, Victoria, ought to have had the most stellar performance in preventing infections and deaths.
Instead, it had the worst in Australia. By a country mile.
Yet, those responsible for the disastrously wrong advice have never been held accountable. Nor are they ever likely to be. At best, they’re being allowed to quietly slip into the shadows. Clutching their massive taxpayer-funded pensions.
Take Jeroen Weimar. Daniel Andrews’ Covid commander in the dark days of 2020 stood beside the premier at those interminable press conferences as Victoria was locked down harder and longer than almost anywhere on earth. He is the same public service fat cat who later oversaw the Commonwealth Games farce that collapsed under its own cost blowouts. The same Weimar is now secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning, overseeing the unfunded $34 billion Suburban Rail Loop and other major project disasters.
The future of one of Victoria’s highest-paid and highest-profile public service fat cats, Jeroen Weimar, is the subject of intense speculation within Labor as Ben Carroll orders an overhaul of the state’s bureaucracy.
New Premier Ben Carroll has already swung the axe at Department of Premier and Cabinet Secretary Jeremi Moule, who was a favourite of both Andrews and Jacinta Allan. In his place comes Treasury’s Chris Barrett. Labor sources are now muttering that Weimar, a favourite of the previous regime and believed to pull down up to $800,000 a year, may be next.
Doubts over Mr Weimar continuing as Victoria’s Department of Transport and Planning secretary emerged after the new premier moved quickly on Friday to axe former premier Jacinta Allan’s department chief Jeremi Moule.
Carroll is merely stamping his authority, rather than enacting anything remotely resembling natural justice. Weimar does not command the same support in the new administration that he enjoyed under Andrews and Allan, so he’s simply being quietly let go. After years of catastrophic policy failure dressed up as ‘following the science’, the Covid class is being quietly shuffled sideways or out the door – still on the public teat, of course.
Weimar’s career trajectory is a perfect microcosm of the entire Victorian disaster. Appointed Covid commander mid-pandemic, he helped deliver the world’s longest and harshest lockdowns. The result? Victoria recorded the worst outcomes in the country. Then he was handed the Commonwealth Games, which were cancelled amid ballooning costs and public ridicule. Now he sits atop the transport and planning portfolio, where the Suburban Rail Loop continues to bleed money with no clear end in sight.
None of this has ever been subject to accountability. No inquiry into the lockdown harms. No reckoning for the economic and social wreckage. Just a smooth transition from one highly paid sinecure to the next. The public servants who enforced the most destructive public health experiment in Australian history are not in the dock. They are not even in the unemployment queue. They are simply waiting to see whether the new boss keeps them on the payroll.
Mr Weimar is most remembered for being appointed Victoria’s Covid-19 response commander in July 2020 in the midst of Victoria’s world-record pandemic lockdown.
Hawley’s interrogation of Fauci was satisfying theatre. Watching the Victorian Covid class begin to feel a chill wind under a new premier is mildly amusing. But it is not justice. Justice would involve open inquiries, public disgrace and the forfeiture of those gold-plated pensions. Instead we get bureaucratic musical chairs. The same people who got everything wrong keep collecting their cheques while the rest of us live with the consequences.
The Covid class never faced the music. They just changed the conductor.
