Peta Credlin documentary: Explosive new claim about Victoria’s second wave origin
An explosive investigation into Victoria’s bungled hotel quarantine system has revealed its “catastrophic” failures and a stunning omission from the inquiry into it.
Sky News host Peta Credlin presented the hour-long documentary, which aired on Sunday night, and showed the heartbreaking human stories which came about as a result of the failures.
Those failures are understood to be responsible for the vast majority of Victoria’s second wave, with 819 dead in the state to date and thousands of businesses closed for good.
Credlin spoke to a business owner who broke down in tears as he spoke of his struggles, a grieving family that was forced to say goodbye to a loved one on Zoom and a doctor who spoke of a surge in mental health problems.
She also asked big questions of the hotel quarantine inquiry — asking whether it was fit for purpose after it failed to take in evidence from a key player in the system.
That person is Andrew McLean, whose company Elite Protection Services (EPS), ran security at Rydges on Swanston — where the vast majority of Victoria’s second wave cases are understood to have stemmed from.
He told Credlin he detailed a breakdown in command and breaches of protocols in a submission to the hotel inquiry.
But for a reasons he cannot understand, his 500-page submission has not been accepted as evidence and he was never called up.
EPS had been subcontracted by the Sydney-based Unified Security which had been awarded the bulk of the hotel security work in a contract worth more than $30m.
He spoke of scenes of confusion at the hotel — where he claimed all the positive cases from other hotels and infected workers from the Cedar Meats plant were sent to stay.
“I don’t think any of us really knew how important this was, from a perspective of how dangerous the whole COVID situation was going to be,” he said.
“I literally didn’t leave Rydges. I came home for a bit of a sleep but for the first two weeks, I didn’t leave. So it was red hot. When I say it was hot, it was a high-pressure environment. You had multiple departments having different ideas about the way things should be run.”
Mr McLean said his company was dealing with the fact there were not established protocols about what guests were able to do.
“There was conversations and conflict between whether the guests were able to have fresh-air walks,” he said.
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/peta-credlin-documentary-explosive-new-claim-about-victorias-second-wave-origin/news-story/ef9e9dd9f419c6276612f7819b8fafd4
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