The Coate inquiry has failed to answer one of the most important questions it was established to resolve; the author of the fateful decision to put private security guards on the front line of its quarantine hotels.
Further material produced to the inquiry by senior figures in the Andrews government and Victoria Police, including previously undisclosed calls records, other communications and freshly sworn affidavits, has shed little to no light on why private security was preferred over police and ADF personnel for a crucial role in the state’s pandemic defences.
Former police chief commissioner Graham Ashton giving evidence to the inquiry in September.
Sources familiar with the matter have told The Age that counsel assisting the inquiry, in their final submissions provided to the parties, maintain their previous narrative that the involvement of security guards was based on a standing assumption, rather than a decision by any individual.
The latest material puts Victoria’s former top bureaucrat Chris Eccles at odds with the state’s former police commissioner Graham Ashton over the contents of a brief telephone conversation they had shortly after a national cabinet meeting on March 27 where the decision to forcibly quarantine all returned travellers was made.
