As reported yesterday on The BFD, the curious (if not exactly surprising) finding of the Coate inquiry into Victoria’s catastrophically failed hotel quarantine scheme is that no one is responsible.
Not the Premier. Not his Ministers. Not his senior bureaucrats.
Perhaps taking a leaf out of the Homer J Simpson handbook on shifting blame, the closest the inquiry got to blaming anyone was to note that using private security guards was the “preference” of conveniently-former chief commissioner of police Graham Ashton. Ashton denies making the decision, but, somewhat equivocally, says he “did not object” to private security guads.
Well, that’s handy. The closest anyone gets to wearing blame is a public servant who’s already retired. No need for any heads to roll! Go back to your business, people.
[Justice Coate] says this finding is “likely to shock the public”. But will it? Anyone who has followed the inquiry would not be surprised that the decision everyone in government was desperate to flee from was not documented.
As Coate says, in a masterful piece of understatement, “this was at odds with any normal application of the principles of the Westminster system of responsible government”.
But that’s the Dan Andrews way. Despite being a notorious control freak, “Dictator Dan” is all duck, dodge and weave whenever it hits the fan – as it so often does in Victoria. With characteristic chutzpah, Andrews sniffs that, “Disappointingly, that person (who made the decision) seems determined to remain anonymous”.
Yes, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you, Dan?
No wonder former Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos is calling for Andrews’ phone records for the fateful day of decision (oddly, yes, the inquiry determined the day the decision was made, but not who made it) to be released.
At the height of the Victorian crisis, it was speculated that Coate’s eventual findings had the potential to put the Premier’s position in jeopardy.
But Coate’s report does not contain any damning direct findings against Andrews. It will not take him out.
The Australian
Of course not. The inquiry itself was never intended to: without impugning Coate’s integrity, it is plain that the inquiry was designed by the Victorian government to obscure, not reveal.
More damningly, Victorians themselves remain too blindly wedded to the Cult of Dan. Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you will, but the sight of Victorians in lockdown glued to their televisions for Andrews’s daily Big Brother-like press conferences was a depressing lesson on how authoritarian cults of personality work.
It seems sadly certain that Victorians will continue to robotically chant “#IStandWithDan” all the way.
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