Wednesday, 23 February 2022

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Inquiry into the Victorian Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ms CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:30): I rise to speak to the report on the inquiry into the Victorian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first case in Australia was found on 25 January 2020, over two years ago. It does seem like a lifetime ago. So much has happened to every single Australian and every single Victorian. Of course here in Victoria there is no doubt that, with the harshest of restrictions and the longest of lockdowns, those impacts have been felt harder than by many others around the country.

The Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, looking into the government’s response at the time, made a number of recommendations. One was around looking at contact tracing and national benchmarks. They made findings around that and then made recommendations with regard to it. The government in their response did support this in principle. In their response to that particular recommendation, I note that the government said that:

The government continues to utilise all avenues available to ensure information is sufficient to allow communication with close contacts.

… The requirement is mandated under Chief Health Officer directions and provides contact tracers with immediate access to electronic records to rapidly contain an outbreak.

Expansion of this record keeping requirement to all industries is underway following the state-wide lockdown in late May 2021 and will further strengthen the availability of information for contact tracing.

Admittedly that response was written on a date I cannot quite find, but it was in response to that report of February 2021, so a year ago. They were referring to lockdown 4. Well, we have had a few more lockdowns and a few more mandates since then.

The reason I raise this particular issue in this particular report is that I received another email from a woman today that goes to the point about how poor the response has been from the department in relation to contact tracing. She first emailed me on 10 January. She emailed the Minister for Health, telling him about the failures in the system. She said:

I am confused, frustrated and disillusioned that we are now into our 3rd year managing COVID in Victoria and still our taxes are paying for incompetence.

On the morning of 7/1/2022 my husband and I reported a Positive RAT reading and we received the text below from DHHS …

It says:

Thank you for notifying the Department of your positive COVID-19 rapid antigen test.

…

You may be contacted by the COVID Positive Pathways Program.

We need you to do three things now …

and it goes through that. A day later she received another text from a mobile number, which at first she thought was a scam email because it looked as if someone had hacked the site. But it was a cut and paste. It says:

Dear Kathleen,

Thank you for notifying the Department of your positive COVID-19 rapid antigen test result.

In this message it says:

This message provides updated information about your isolation period and replaces previous advice. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

She said she then received a third text on that same day. It says:

Dear Kathleen,

Thank you for notifying the Department of your positive COVID 19 rapid antigen test result.

…

Unfortunately the message sent provided your test date, which was an error. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

This is like a bad episode of Yes Minister or something worse. It goes on and on, and she has not had any response from the department giving her guidance about the confusing instructions that she has had. I raise that because I have been saying for many months now that the contact tracing has failed in this state. In fact it started to fail in mid-August of last year when the system became so overwhelmed. But, yes, we have had QR codes and they have finally been ditched after 100 000 PCR tests had to be thrown out because there was no way that the system could cope. This goes to a lack of planning and a lack of preparation, and it is a continual sign of the mismanagement of the COVID response.

There are so many more issues that I need to speak about in the interests of all Victorians so that these failures are not swept under the carpet, like the government is trying to do, that they are highlighted and that we can constantly improve. We have been debating all day various issues around mandates. I will be interested to see the government backflip on a few of those, no doubt, in a few days. But I will be saying more on this in the future.