If the Vic media could stop obsessing over a desire to find The One Person To Blame re hotel quazza and focus instead on the systemic failures of DHHS that would be absolutely excellent.

Journos mostly think they're Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, and no. Fuckups are almost always not from one person. They're systemic failures. Poorly designed processes and procedures, folks under pressure, that is how bad outcomes happen.

Trying to attribute blame re hotel quazza to one person is actually harmful. As with sending cops after someone who broke lockdown rules, it means people won't be forthcoming and you wont get useful information.

Re blame game I fully expect that at some point when shit in Vic settles down Andrews will step down, say "yep sure let me be the target for blame" and fuck off to spend time with his family and who can blame him. The systemic issues remain. That's what should be the focus

Both @SquigglyRick and @oz_f have been reporting on systemic failures rather than bullshit about who was personally to blame. That's the thing to report on.

You can't fix a systemic failure by having one person get sacked or resigned. You instead need to look at repairing the systemic failures. This isn't new. See the Challenger inquiry. The shuttle was lost not because 1 person made a bad call, it was procedures and processes.

And NASA took the results of the inquiry and fixed the processes. Not enough, given the loss of Columbia, but then they learned more from that too.

When shit goes wrong, that's an opportunity to fix what went wrong, so it doesn't happen again. Trying to assign blame means you won't be able to understand what went wrong, because people won't speak up.

To circle back to the hotel quazza fuckup in Vic, it was clearly a case of systemic failure. The cops didn't want to do security, there was an existing bias towards outsourcing, DHHS didn't have capability to oversee it. This isn't "that one person fucked up".

That Vic contact tracers didn't smack it down early wasn't some person going I choose to let covid run rampant. It was because the processes and procedures didn't let the tracers do that. It's really boring but this sort of stuff matters.

The really really boring stuff (for journos) about "how does contact tracing work" is far more important than "did you order private security guards". NSW had private security too, but had a working contact tracing system that smacked down cases.

The reason people have been getting mad about journos at the daily Andrews press confs is they keep asking the same fucking questions trying to find the one person responsible, and honestly who gives a fuck? It does not matter. Fix the systemic problems.

See also the "horny quarantine guard" myth. It wasnt true, but pinning blame on That One Guy is easier than trying to find explain that the HQ setup was thrown together quickly and mistakes were inevitable.

See also the BLM protests spread the rona myth. It was always completely untrue. But AU journos are largely focussed on finding "that one person or event" because examining systemic failures requires actually making an effort.

And with maybe a dozen or so exceptions, Australian journalists are extremely lazy and unwilling to actually do any research.

Anyway thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Demand better from journalism, but don't be abusive of course.

Additional note: fuck Andrew Bolt in particular