Intro
The
Victoria Hotel Quarantine saga has raised eyebrows amidst unfolding Board of
Inquiry revelations [Inquiry Link]. I browsed through some of the transcripts and picked up a couple of concerning
themes. Here is my take so far:
- Funding, governance, and compliance structures were assembled without adequate regard to the function of Government entities and delegates vested with Public Health and Wellbeing Act powers and carriage of the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015 provisions.
- The DHSS agency lead role was sidelined without clear appreciation of potential ramifications for infection disease control
- Procurement structures and performance reporting lines relating to Covid-19 infection control are not connected
- The notion of shared accountability and blurred roles feature strongly
List of evidence transcripts from the Inquiry drawn upon for this article can be located at the end of this piece.
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| Courtesy: AAP cited on SBS |
Governance structures excluded key public health officials
- The Chief Health Officer and public health experts were largely not included in critical high State strategic planning such as Operation Soteria.
- Public health and communicable disease expert staff excluded from designing of Operation Soteria. They had no ‘involvement of Public Health Command in Operation Soteria’, noted one senior health bureaucrat. ‘The Operation Soteria meetings I attended did not involve the [Public Health Command] initially, and did seem to me to focus heavily on logistics considerations.’
- Failure to adequately include key health officials in high level decision-making mechanisms led to ‘lack of a unified plan for [Operation Soteria]’ and deprived opportunity for the Health Department to bring to bear a lead expertise role in underpinning ‘policy and set of processes to manage the healthcare and welfare of detainees’.
- The frustration experienced by the somewhat sidelined health leads is illustrated in the evidence before the Board of Inquiry. They asked those controlling pandemic State structures above them in these terms: “The Chief Health Officer and Deputy Chief Health Officer require a single plan to be produced for review by 10am tomorrow morning Friday 10 April. This plan must include....we have some dot points….The plan will need to show all processes and policy decisions, and manage health and safety of detainees.”
- A minor concession was made to their demand, they were allowed a “Public Health Command liaison” – a liaison status in their view “is not the same as having direct oversight and direct view of the daily challenges and operational complexities of that program… the public health view and the public health expertise with respect to that would have been beneficial to be more directly engaged”.
- As the Chief Health Officer had no operational line management responsibility over Operational Soteria, he says he only became aware of deficiencies in infection control after an outbreak.
So in looking for what went wrong in Victoria
leading to hundreds of deaths, economic and social disruption, we also need to
be asking what exactly the Victoria Government intended to be achieved by
excluding these health officials from these critical planning structures??
It is also fair to ask that Victoria Health
Department teams are actually the very personnel with delegated authority to
help secure community safety through powers vested through the State Public Health and Wellbeing Act and also
the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015.
When the very senior bureaucrats and
politicians in the State overlook or circumvent the roles vested with
professional experts and street-level-bureaucracy, how are these officers going
to effectively carry their statutory role when not sufficiently involved in
designing critical operational underpinnings?
Evidence
at Board of Inquiry cites the Crisis Council of Cabinet as a decision-making
entity that formulates Victoria’s Covid-19 pandemic policy response, including
resource allocation. So what exactly did this Crisis Council of Cabinet
authorise in relation to Operation Soteria funding?
The Victoria Expenditure Review Committee allocated $80m to the Department of Jobs to manage the Hotel Quarantine among other things. Who sits in this entity and how does it all fit in in terms of past and future funding allocation decisions they make?
Shared Accountability and Blurred Statutory Compliance
A
constant claim made in some of the evidence before the Board of Inquiry that
the decisions made are justified under the notion of “shared accountability’’. There are benefits working
across-government, but there are fundamental questions raised in the Victoria
Quarantine Hotel saga:
- Why ignore compliance accountability under the State Public Health and Wellbeing Act when setting up structures of shared responsibility? Surely top of your mind when you are bringing together interagency parties involves including relevant health delegates already mandated in their departmental roles to fulfil responsibilities connected to their statutory role? You will have others drawn in for sure from across governments as appropriate.
- The Victoria Government did not designate the Chief Health Officer as State Controller – thus failing to comply with its own legislative Act in managing a pandemic. Is this not odd when dealing with a pandemic, and when the legislation requires this official to act as the State Controller?
- In giving evidence, Minister Mikakos seemed unperturbed that the State Chief Health Officer was sidelined from occupying the role of a State Controller during a pandemic and says “it was not an issue of concern…not live issue”. What are the implications for statutory compliance in public administration? Why support the blurring of roles at such a critical time? On the other hand, are there other reasons the Minister was aware of that we in the public are not privy to?
- Confusion persist about the role of DHHS as lead coordinating agency from role of the State Control Centre as a coordinating mechanism and decision-making agency
- DHSS Departmental Secretary Ms Peake has a different understanding of what is meant by DHSS being a lead agency. She says DHSS had a role only to a point. She says pandemic issues go beyond Victoria jurisdiction. Oddly though, she does not unpack the statutory responsibilities expected of her Department under Victoria Public Health and Wellbeing Act powers or the powers vested with her Department under the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015.
- The Minister of Health says she had not been briefed or read Operational Plan Soteria till Rydges and Stamford Hotel outbreaks – but it was a big pandemic response thing happening.
- Minister says was not involved in development, consultation or authorisation of the quarantine model. And says “it was a multiagency response involving many Departments and agencies, and I would have expected them to work together on these issues.’
- Clearly evidence show the Department of Health was not driving Operation Soteria, yet the Plan says the Department of Health is the control agency and ‘’responsible for oversight and coordination’’.
- Is there also a confusion and blurring of roles between what the Minister of Health is expected to lead and what the Emergency Management Commissioner is meant to do in times of pandemic??
- It turns out the need to outline clear pandemic response structures and leadership was identified as far back as 2011 but the State of Victoria has not addressed this issue. Is it going to be addressed this time?
- Lack of clarification for these basic definitional issues has ramifications for future agency role clarity, transparency, collaboration and accountability.
- Evidence given at the Board of Inquiry cites the Crisis Council of Cabinet as a decision-making entity that formulates Victoria’s Covid-19 pandemic policy response, including resource allocation. So what exactly did this Crisis Council of Cabinet authorise in relation to Operation Soteria funding? Who is part of this Council?
- The Victoria Expenditure Review Committee allocated $80m to the Department of Jobs to manage the Hotel Quarantine among other things. Who sits in this entity?
- Emergency Management Act – is there potential for some politician in the future to do away with other important legislative and operational compliance requirements in the name of the Emergency Management Act? How are they to be kept accountable? How will the public be able to follow lines of accountability? As we have seen in the Victoria saga, no single top bureaucrat or politician owns up to the hotel quarantine saga!
Procurement Structures Unconnected to Performance Reporting Lines
The Victoria purchasing and performance
reporting structures for the Hotel Quarantine Program oddly neglected the lead
and oversight statutory role expected of a Health Department.
- Procurement governance set up did not allow the Department of Health from effectively undertaking performance administration and monitoring activities in a manner you would expect under any Government Purchasing and Contracting Policies and Guidelines.
- As DHHS lead role was sidelined or ignored, in effect, procurement arrangements did not sufficiently embed operational supply, capabilities and performance arrangements aligned with expectations under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act powers and provisions under the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015.
- It seems the Victoria Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions who managed the hotel tender funds did the best they could leading in procuring hotels, drawing up supply contract specifications and administration, including of security guards as assigned. But authorities higher up above the Department did not take into account that to manage contracts effectively should have allowed DHSS a lead role at least in procurement, administration, performance monitoring and support of contracted suppliers in connection to training, PPE, and cleaning.
- As already noted there was role confusion and blurring of roles. In the context of procurement and monitoring performance a response from Department of Jobs illuminates this point: “Well, certainly from a DJPR perspective we were certainly responsible for the operational elements of, you know, functions that were relating to DJPR. But to the best of my knowledge, our Department did not have any involvement on health-related matters.”
- The issue here is structural. If decision-makers further higher up place procurement responsibility with one agency and then expect another agency to be responsible for performance without clear management lines of responsibility, this is odd and really puts operational workers in difficult situation.
- In my view, there is nothing wrong for procurement method to embed job-creation as secondary objective. But the highest levels of bureaucracy and political leadership needed to ensure intergovernmental structures and processes did not sideline primary compliance objectives under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act powers & the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015.
Government Transferred Risk to
Contracted Parties
The Victoria Government transferred risk to its suppliers without adequate attention to third party capacity or support measures. This is indicated in insufficient arrangements for training, PPE and cleaning necessary to minimise the spread of coronavirus by the returning travellers and workers at hotel sites to the rest of the community.
Courtesy: AAP as cited on ABC
A
seemingly well-meaning purchasing officer from DJPR explained that:
“To my knowledge, the cleaning, you know, was --- there
was a contractual obligation on the part of the supplier to ensure that they
met whatever the nationally accepted standards were for COVID-19. So, from my
perspective, it was not something that I was administering actively in that
sense. We were in contact with hotels on a regular basis to discover whether
there were any issues that were of concern. But I think I had referred earlier
on that a lot of the day-to-day issues were actually managed on the ground
between the on-site management teams from both DHHS and DJPR and the hotels.”
Perhaps
the transfer of disease infection control risk to the contracted third parties
was not intentional – at least to the extent that we can’t expect Department of
Jobs bureaucrats to be thoroughly versed with infection control – why would
they? But we would expect Ministers and senior bureaucrats higher up in
Government to be thoughtful about which Government entities are vested with
funding, contracting and performance monitoring of matters involving infectious
or communicable diseases.
I
suspect there are stacks of Government Purchasing Policies and Guidelines they
could have used to refine their purchasing processes. This is whether they
wanted to use a preferred panel contracting arrangements or any framework
allowable under their Purchasing Policy. And also whether they included
job-creation as a secondary objective or not. They still needed to be
transparent in their processes and follow due diligence at least with
well-planned support measures for contracted third parties.
We
can’t assume at this point that a lesson is learnt about went wrong at the
level of purchasing. For those familiar with contracting and tendering policies,
you will certainly be interested in looking at the evidence given by various
parties about how the funding was allocated to DJPR in the first place.
I
was a bit troubled that the then Minister of Health and her Health Departmental
Secretary appear not to reflect on the risks either given that the funds to
manage infection control at hotel sites were not allocated directly to their
Department. We also now know the Minister of Health had no say in the matter and
says she didn’t even know about Operation Soteria before interagency
stakeholders designed it!
And
where does the Victoria Crisis Cabinet Council and also the Expenditure Review
Committee sit in all this in respect of decisions they made about funding
allocation?
This
story is still unfolding, so conclusive remarks will be premature. But what has
emerged from this inquiry so far presents a lot of food for thought.
As it unfolds……
Lately
we saw resignations of the Head of Department of Premier & Cabinet and also
the DHSS Minister. There are still issues of accountability and transparency to be unpacked. As
the story unfolds, and with hundreds of lives lost in Victoria, it is a puzzle
as to:
- Why the Chief Health Officer was not designated as State Controller as per legislative requirement in managing a pandemic
- Why key health officials were excluded from critical planning structures?
- Why did the Victoria Government use procurement structures that were not directly linked to performance reporting lines?
- Does the Victoria Government acknowledge that it transferred risk to contracted private security agencies instead of allowing DHSS to take a lead role in setting up and managing infection controls at hotel sites? Regardless whether private security agencies were involved or not, DHSS should have led with direct performance reporting lines.
The
notion of shared responsibility may come under scrutiny, especially where it
can be consciously or unconsciously used to blur statutory compliance,
in the process disrupting transparency and accountability.
References
Victoria
Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry
https://www.quarantineinquiry.vic.gov.au/hearings-transcripts
Transcript of Day 10
Hearing 31 August 2020 (Menon)
Transcript of Day 18
Hearing 16 September 2020 (Sutton)
Transcript of Day 22
Hearing 22 September 2020 (Phemister, Peake)
Transcript of Day 23
Hearing 23 September 2020 (Peake)
Transcript of Day 24
Hearing 24 September 2020 (Mikakos)
Transcript of Day 25 Hearing 25 September 2020 (Andrews)
