After one of the worst ever years for Australians, our state governments are lining up for medals for collectively delivering the nation’s worst public administration since Federation.

The performance of the states — taken together — calls into question the very capacity of our federation to exist in its current form and confront the challenges of the 21st century. All politics may be local, but issues that really matter tend to be national or global.

The difficulties in making the National Cabinet fully functional is a testament to the idiocy of parochial politics. It underscores what we all know to be the petty-minded nature of junior governments in being unable to agree on anything of consequence in voters’ interests. 

If this year (with bushfires and a pandemic) wasn’t ‘the’ year for collective action in the national interest – it’s fair to ask what it would take short of war? 

The jaw-dropping romantic escapades of the New South Wales Premier with a shonky, disgraced ex-MP get a bronze medal for her state, while Queensland secures silver for subjecting the nation to a tawdry, entirely scripted and painstakingly manipulated election campaign.  

The raw, myopic, sad politics of Premier Palaszczuk in keeping the borders closed until, oh, let’s guess Monday (or whenever she secures a guarantee of supply) is emblematic of how low our politics have sunk. 

But for all that, it’s Victoria that stands atop the podium with gold for comprehensively failing to keep faith with taxpayers in the Covid hotel quarantine debacle, a central factor in the deaths of more than 800 people, most of them elderly, vulnerable citizens.  Oh, did I mention that the Andrews’ Cabinet decisions also trashed the economy?

In the 120 torturous media appearances the Premier made during the lockdown hardly a word was said about business, employment or the economy. The issues apparently don’t matter to the Premier.

With ‘high fives’ still the order of the day in Dan Andrews’ massively over-staffed Spring Street bunker, taxpayers have been subject to multiple examples of astounding administrative malpractice. As Premier Andrews reaches higher up the shelf for an expensive whisky the full horror of his disgraceful leadership is only just becoming apparent.

Whether in health, safety, transport, procurement, budgetary responsibility or financial probity, the Andrews Government has nothing to be proud of and much to answer for. The electorate will see to it that this oh so politically correct Labor outfit does pay. 

Also going to Victoria is the 2020 gold medal for obfuscation and treachery — some of it while bureaucrats and Ministers were under oath at the Inquiry into hotel quarantine arrangements.  

Numerous, serious unanswered questions remain regarding the procurement of services relating to the quarantine fiasco and it is here that we may just find the source of a malodorous stench emanating from the Victorian capital. 

Thanks to a convenient and ‘elegant’ piece of bureaucratic choreography that Inquiry will report just a few days before Christmas, at which time our attention might just be elsewhere.

As only the Victorian Premier could do, he shoved his dispensable former health minister Jenny Mikakos under a passing bus  and then farewelled his most senior, hand-picked public servant when it emerged he had ‘misled’ an inquiry into the hotel quarantine shambles.  

Cold, hard, isolationist Dan could not even bring himself to express thanks to Chris Eccles while announcing his demise after 35 years in the public service. 

In what was an excruciatingly obvious, pre-determined lapse of collective memory ministers, officials and hacks, one after the other, humiliated themselves and this once great state by feigning collective amnesia about quarantining and even what they’d eaten for breakfast. It was, we’re led to believe a ‘kind of’ collective decision.

Anyone with an ounce of nous knows the full gruesome catastrophe of this government’s actions this year will not be fully felt until next year and quite possibly many years after that.

Suicide is tragically more prevalent in Victoria especially amongst the young, mental welling has been significantly compromised for many, economic ruin has undone businesses built from scratch by hard-working people risking their own money.

With business groups and leaders across the nation denouncing Andrews’ anti-business approach to a health crisis, it is now obvious to all that this Premier, along with his motley bunch of acolytes, are tone-deaf to anyone not useful to them, not ideologically and politically aligned to them and not following the same script as them.

Andrews couldn’t care less what is said or written about him. He wouldn’t even bother reading it. His arrogance, his feigned concern for others, his obscene deflection of views counter to his own reveal a man not fit to lead any government — not even one as disgraced and diminished as his own outfit.