Systemic failures highlight similarities between Crown Resorts and hotel quarantine
An article in The Australian this week has pointed out “remarkable similarities” between Crown’s failure to run its Victorian casino properly and the way the Victorian government is failing with the hotel quarantine system.
The article claims it is the management systems of both Crown and the government that are at fault for their current failures. So no matter if Lindsay Fox comes up with a viable quarantine solution, it will likely fail because it is the management systems not the locations that are the problem.
Failings such as those we have seen at Crown and in Victoria’s quarantine, usually lead to administrative change.
In the corporate world, it’s the shareholders that bring on the transformation. In the government sector, party politicians or voters – if an election is not far away – are the ones to replace existing systems.
In both instances of the Crown debacle and the hotel quarantine failure, these processes did not work.
Crown is a public company. However the Board failed to recognise that without the use of James Packer’s skills or the ability act against Mr Packer and was thus rudderless. Packer is said to have still run Crown as a family business with control over the shareholder base.
The Victorian government is in a similar position.
The Australian journalist Robert Gottliebsen writes, “In the case of Crown, the Victorian regulator had the power to force change but did not use it. Similarly in hotel quarantine a Victorian government regulator, WorkSafe, also has the power to prosecute and so enforce change, but has not used that power.”
In the near future, Worksafe will see an increase in pressure to do its job properly.
Gottliebsen points out that two regulators in Victoria failed to do their job, which exposes a weakness in the Victorian regulatory system.
He says that NSW has better handled the Crown saga, given it was a NSW inquiry that forced a review into Crown management and its board, which is now undergoing significant change including the resignation of board members and Crown Resorts CEO Ken Barton.
As far as Victorian hotel quarantine is concerned, Gottliebsen believesoutside pressure will eventually force WorkSafe to recommend to the prosecutor that prosecutions be launched.
Irit Jackson, 16th February 2021
