ONE of the first things a parent teaches a child is that honesty is the best policy.
And that you’re always better off owning your mistake than trying to cover it up.
Sadly, it’s a lesson that seems to have been lost on governments during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Take the Victorian Government’s hotel quarantine inquiry, where every minister and the Premier claimed they didn’t know who was responsible.
They could have owned the mistake and the story may have ended there. Instead, they collectively forgot, and the story continues to do their reputation damage.
For most of us mere voters, making mistakes in an unprecedented pandemic is understandable, and forgivable, but not owning those mistakes is where we take issue.
Which brings us to the debacle of last week, where hundreds of Mildura residents, and no doubt some visiting tourists, were ordered to immediately be tested for COVID-19 and self-isolate after Harvey Norman Mildura was incorrectly listed as a tier 1 exposure site on Thursday night.
Lines stretched for hundreds of metres on Friday morning as people waited hours to get tested. They were all forced into panic mode, cancelling weekend plans, adjusting work schedules, as well as school and childcare arrangements. They tried to figure out how they were going to get food into their homes.
All that stress turned out to be for nothing, when about 5pm Bendigo Health issued a one-line statement to say Harvey Norman was not actually a tier 1 site, that it had been “incorrectly published”.
Were those hundreds of Mildura residents pissed off? You bet.
Did they deserve a better explanation? Absolutely.
Sunraysia Daily asked both Bendigo Health and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) a series of questions, including how and why the mistake happened. And, importantly, what measures would be taken to stop it happening again?
But we were met with silence.
The DHHS media team did not return calls and a spokesperson from Bendigo Health said it would not expand on Friday’s statement.
We tried again on Monday. Again, donuts.
“We have nothing further to add to Bendigo Health’s response to the query,” the “press team” responded.
Pathetic, right?
This wasn’t just a little mistake, the kind that we hold our children to account for. This was a monumental stuff-up that inconvenienced people’s lives in a big way on Friday, no doubt causing the cancellation of weekends away as freedoms were restored, let alone the work impacts.
It’s disappointing that governments and their departments continue to behave with such immaturity.
To answer such important questions with a childish shrug of the shoulders is treating this community with contempt. If kids respond with “I’m not telling”, we send them to their rooms. Instead, with Bendigo Health and DHHS, we are asked to continue to put the trust of our health in their hands.
Time they grew up.
