Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:42): Thank you, Acting President, and thank you, Ms Crozier, for your indulgence as well. I rise to speak to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s interim report on the inquiry into the Victorian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the excellent minority report attached to it by Legislative Assembly members Richard Riordan, Danny O’Brien and Bridget Vallence—and our own David Limbrick, who I want to wish happy birthday to today, by the way. As the report notes:

The Victorian Government’s contact tracing efforts were hampered by limited information technology capability and the use of paper-based systems at the outset of the second wave.

Well, where I disagree is the next part, which claims:

These have improved following digital and automation upgrades and the establishment in mid-August 2020 of regional response testing teams.

I find this hard to believe, given my own personal experience. I speak from personal experience because my son and daughter-in-law and their eight-month-old baby came out from England and experienced hotel quarantine in New South Wales, in Sydney. That was a seamless operation in New South Wales, no issues at all. Unfortunately they did leave the hotel and got caught up in the Northern Beaches issue. Eventually they came back to Victoria and were told by New South Wales Health that my daughter-in-law had been in a hotspot so they would need to isolate, so they did isolate in our house, because they were from England and did not have anywhere else to go.

Now, the interesting thing is that the then Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) apparently found it impossible to deal with their isolated clients who have an international mobile number—I do not know how they possibly communicate with people in hotel quarantine if they cannot deal with an international mobile number—so they had to use my mobile number. But they were in isolation. We were in isolation with them, so that seemed extraordinary as well.

Now, every day they were contacted. Every day they had incorrect information. They had the incorrect dates of testing, the incorrect addresses, incorrect names—they could not spell the names properly—nothing was right. Every day a different contact tracer would contact us and the information was always wrong. You just wonder how they could possibly say that there have been digital and automation upgrades. There was nothing digital or automated about the experience that my family endured, and it was an extremely stressful situation, especially if you have got an eight-month-old baby and you have already been in two weeks of hotel quarantine and you are in two weeks of isolation as well. To be in a situation where DHHS every day were suggesting something other than the accurate information was quite extraordinary, and it is no wonder that cases have got out of hotel quarantine. It is no wonder that they cannot manage them in the community, because clearly their contact-tracing system is just some sort of manual thing where a contact tracer is told to make a phone call, a different person every day, and nobody seems to enter the information in a database—if they have got such a thing. At one stage they rang to speak to George. Well, George happens to be an eight-month-old baby. I wondered how they would go about dealing with conversations with eight-month-old babies. I did suggest that that was farcical as well.

So the minority report’s conclusion is most telling. This is what should happen: only a royal commission can unequivocally scrutinise the Victorian government’s response to COVID-19, learn the crucial lessons from the catastrophic failures, ensure the fatal flaws are never repeated and provide for Victorians the truth they truly deserve.