From the Australian - subscriber only:
Desperate Dan has only himself to blame
"Daniel Andrews is now clearly the worst-performing, most unsuccessful premier or territory leader in Australia in managing the COVID-19 outbreak, despite being the most authoritarian.
The Victorian government’s failure is damaging for Victorians and for the whole of Australia.
The rolling lockdowns in ever greater parts of Melbourne, with disadvantaged people now confined in tiny apartments in horrible high-rise buildings, is the direct outcome of the government’s botched performance.
Andrews’s failure is broad, and is both political and technocratic.
If you go out shopping, people will die, no pair of shoes is worth a life, etc. And he positively excoriated golf, apparently the devil’s own pastime.
Yet when faced with managing a group of people — international returnees going into quarantine — who were almost certainly carrying a disproportionate rate of virus infections, and who were possibly traumatised by the struggle many had to get home at all and were therefore likely to chafe against a fortnight in a hotel room, the Andrews government chose the least-trained workforce it could possibly imagine for the job.
This is staggering incompetence. Anyone familiar with the security industry knows how meagre its general training is. Now the security officers, who were neither trained nor equipped nor well paid for the job they were asked to do, have been effectively silenced. But their union has spoken out.
Guards were given 30 seconds training, meaning they just signed a form saying they’d read a piece of paper, or sometimes three minutes training, for the hotel roles. And this on the watch of the Premier who set up a regime that fined people for going to Bunnings when Bunnings was legally open.
Now in its customary politburo style, the Victorian government has decided it doesn’t need to answer a single question, nor accept a single iota of democratic accountability for this debacle until an official inquiry reports, presumably when the heat has gone out of the issue.
But there were political failures too. The Andrews government was happy to name all sorts of institutions with breakouts when it suited them politically, even a school linked to an inactive case to support the government’s then desire to keep schools shut.
But the Cedar Meats abattoir — Labor donors and full of Labor mates — had their identity protected until it was dragged out by the media. This turned out to be a very significant outbreak. Surely common sense tells you that naming them early would have encouraged any of their casual contacts to get tested. A measure of a political leader’s quality is how stringently they will speak to their own supporters when necessary. Andrews notionally discouraged demonstrators, but his efforts to get people not to attend the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were pitiful."
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Daniel Andrews should resign (Read 16665 times)
