Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has perfected the Bart Simpson response: I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove a thing. Andrews first tested this line during the Red Shirts scandal but has since made it a dark political art. Nowhere more so than in his state’s appalling handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andrews’s boilerplate response to Victoria’s mounting failures is denial – and blame-shifting. Andrews and his government have steadfastly refused to shoulder any responsibility, even though the worst outbreaks can all be sheeted home to their own monumental incompetence.
Victoria has recorded its largest daily increase in coronavirus cases, 532, and six more people have died.
Previously, the highest daily tally in the state was on July 22 when 484 cases were recorded.
Those who died are three women, aged in their 70s, 80s and 90s, a man in his 80s and a man in his 50s.
Five of the six deaths were linked to aged care homes.
Worse, he has steadily blamed everyone but himself. Each new rise in infections is blamed on a new scapegoat. Today, it’s workers.
Premier Daniel Andrews said workers, including aged care workers, were continuing to attend work while sick, driving the rise of infections in the state.
“This is the biggest driver, it is not the only issue but its the biggest diver of these numbers going up not down,” he said.
Not that Andrews is going to bother with such footling stuff as evidence before blaming others.
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said many more residents in aged care homes would likely die in coming weeks as outbreaks at facilities continued to grow.
Most aged care outbreaks had been sparked by a single worker, or two workers, attending work while sick, he said.
He implored staff to wear personal protective equipment and said strong infection control protocols would limit the size of outbreaks once they began.
No admission that this is supposedly a heavily-regulated industry which should have been known to be uniquely vulnerable. Which leads to the obvious question: what was the Victorian government doing about it?
After the colossal incompetence of the government’s management of hotel quarantine, not to mention its earlier cover-up of the previously-most-significant outbreak, at a meatworks owned by a Labor party donor, Victorians are entitled to ask just what the government was doing to prevent what outbreaks at what was clearly a timebomb-sector.
Several people have died at St Basil’s Homes for the Aged, and despite a government takeover of the facility last week, families with loved ones in the centre have complained that they have gone for days without word from the facility, only to find the relatives had been admitted to hospital.
This is characteristic of the Victorian government: incompetence, secrecy and glacial bureaucracy.
It’s all very well for the government to blame people for not isolating themselves while awaiting test results, but with results taking weeks to arrive – during which, potentially infected people have no access to targeted government support – should we really be surprised that people decide to err on the side of incaution?
Besides, if community intransigence is to blame, why have other states not fallen as spectacularly victim as Victoria? I find it hard to believe that recklessness is the sole preserve of Melbournians.
Something stinks in Victoria and Daniel Andrews resorting to the “who smelt it, dealt it” defence just isn’t good enough.
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