Even if the recent Board of Inquiry into Victorian Hotel Quarantine Program does not reveal who actually made the now fatal decision to engage private security companies, it will have at least added a new phrase to the lexicon of public discourse – the notion of “creeping assumptions”.

To recap, based on the evidence presented during the public hearings, we have been led to believe that no single person, department or government agency made the all-important decision. Instead, we are left to conclude that this was a decision made by default, based on a series of “creeping assumptions”.

What this suggests is that rather than a conscious or affirmative decision, the parties relied on their own interpretation of unfolding events and information flows to conclude that someone else had made the call to outsource hotel security, and as a consequence everyone involved simply went along with it. As I have pointed out before, the decision to engage private contractors is not the issue. But it does beggar belief that even if nobody could recall who made the decision, they could not point to the information that informed their assumptions, nor could they specify who instructed the drawing up of the commercial contracts. As a result, the Victorian Government has spent $6m to find out who signed off on $30m of expenditure.

Anyway, one of the consequences of these so-called creeping assumptions is that the decision-making was deeply flawed because it lacked process, scrutiny and accountability:

• Process was clearly missing (unless the Inquiry finds otherwise), because of the absence of documented minutes or formal note-taking.
• There was no scrutiny of the “decision”, to confirm the various dependencies and delegated authorities that initiated the contracts issued to private contractors.
• And the fact that no-one can be identified as being responsible for the decision, could mean that no-one can be held accountable.

If nothing else, this will become a case study for students of politics, public administration, and corporate governance.

Next week: Bread & Circuses