Will Victoria’s Journalists Start Doing Their Job?

There were two years between the Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon’s resignation. There was a similar break between Bill Clinton’s infamous Oval Office dalliance and his impeachment trial. In both cases, what was judged most damning was not so much the initial wrongdoing, but the lies and cover-ups which only exposed so much more and worse.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews isn’t even riding as high in opinion polls as Richard Nixon was in 1973 – but the time to his exposure is ticking away. Like Nixon, what will – or should – bring Andrews down is not a government inquiry designed to hide rather than reveal the truth, but the work of fearless investigative journalism.

Nixon had Woodward and Bernstein. Andrews has Peta Credlin. While the bulk of Australia’s left-wing media, especially those living on the taxpayer’s dollar, are inclined to run cover for a socialist premier, Credlin’s ‘Deadly Decisions: Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Catastrophe’ on Sky News is slowly, but surely, chiselling away at Andrews’s Great Wall of Denial.

In many ways while the Credlin report uncovered many new horror facts its clearest portrayal was of a massive cover up. Accordingly it has set the Australian journalistic community an incredibly important task to discover what is actually being covered up.

As in most such events, if you follow the cash it will lead you what is really being hidden and I suspect as the cover up mechanisms are peeled back we will discover that the bad practices extend to other industries and activities.

The cash trail has so far revealed that the Andrews government refused Commonwealth assistance from either the ADF or the Federal Police and, unlike every other state, farmed out security at its hotel quarantine to a private firm running on an expired licence: a firm chosen first and foremost for its “diversity” credentials. Medical services were allegedly granted, without tender, to a firm run by old Labor mates.

And, yes, as the cover-up is slowly peeled away, we’re discovering that Victorian government officials were apparently taking kickbacks and covering up the fact that Melbourne’s trains – a massive vector for virus transmission – were not being properly cleaned at the height of the outbreak.

As I have pointed out many times in an industrial accident of this sort killing hundreds of people, prosecutions would normally have already have been launched by WorkSafe.

And there could be no cover up because WorkSafe have the power to investigate like no other body in the land. There is nothing they cannot requisition, including phone records and all government material.

But in Australia’s Watergate the people who must be investigated are those in the Victorian state government.

The perception, at least, is that WorkSafe Victoria is a creature of the Labor government. Its governing legislation was put together by former Labor premier Steve Bracks. Its board is white-anted with old Labor mates. Its chief executive is an old Labor hand, a former staffer for one-time leader John Brumby and former Finance Minister Tim Holding.

To date, despite a WorkSafe investigation under way by request of a private citizen (as the Bracks legislation allows), there is no evidence that the chief executive has applied any of his extraordinary powers.

Accordingly I fear – and I certainly hope my fears are unfounded – there is incredible pressure being put on WorkSafe to be part of the cover-up. If that’s true, then, as in the US it’s going to be up to the journalists to uncover the truth. And Peta Credlin has given them plenty of directions as to where to look to strip away the cover-up[…]

As journalists dig deeper I think we are going to find that there is far more being covered up than simply a systems breakdown. The whole situation smells of something improper taking place.

At the moment, the vast bulk of the mainstream media are clamping a Labor-red peg on their noses and shamelessly cheerleading for “Dictator Dan”.

Maybe, just maybe, the legacy media will start doing its job and start sniffing after the trail of breadcrumbs that Credlin, a real journalist, has uncovered.

But then, pigs might sprout wings, too.

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