A late Friday night thread on Twitter abuse and Victoria’s COVID-19 crisis, for those who are interested #springst

I temporarily deleted the Twitter app off my phone yesterday afternoon, because I simply didn't have the time or the mental energy to do my job and absorb all the mentions, direct messages, emails, texts, calls, WhatsApps and Facebook messages coming in: good, bad or otherwise.

Until I received a message from Health Minister @JennyMikakos just now - and I thank her for getting in touch - I knew people were saying some bad stuff but was blissfully unaware that the unhinged messages had even reached the point of including death threats.

I was on a rostered day off today and I'm not supposed to be working over the weekend - not that I've had an uninterrupted day off since March - as is the case for a lot of tired, stressed, hard-working people in Victoria at the moment, our Premier & his team included.

I'm briefly interrupting my time off Twitter to address what happened yesterday and the messages and mentions I've received since, but I won't be sticking around on this website for the rest of the weekend.

Journalists should never be above criticism, and I'm always willing to hear it if it's constructive, but no one should face relentless personal abuse for doing their job.

I'm thick-skinned, and I'm not going to let a bunch of awful trolls who don't know me get the better of me, but I'd be lying and letting others who've experienced similar down if I said that the kinds of messages I've received over the past couple of days don't have an impact.

It's harmful and unnecessary. Don't do it.

To the hundreds of people, some of whom I know well and others who I've never met, who have got in touch to say nice things over the past day or so - thank you! I'm trying to reply to as many as I can and your kind words mean a lot.

For those wondering what all the attacks were about, I'm a bit mystified too. I asked the Premier five questions (several of which were follow-ups) during a press conference that went for more than 90 minutes. These were the questions.

I'm not sure what's unreasonable or controversial about them.

As this delightful email, which I received after today's press conference, at which I was not present, indicates, many of the attacks are far from rational.

And although a high proportion of those doing the attacking appear to be women (there are plenty of men too), a lot of them do seem to have more of a problem with my female colleagues and me asking questions than they do with our male counterparts.

It's outrageous that I even feel I have to address this next bit, but given the persistence of a rumour that's been doing the rounds on this toxic website for weeks, I will make it clear that I am not "related to" @TimSmithMP.

I have two sisters, one of whom has lived overseas since 2014. She went out with Tim in her teens and early 20s and broke up with him more than five years ago.

How this would be relevant to her work, let alone mine, I do not know. My own, current, long term partner worked as a senior staffer for Rudd-Gillard ministers for five years - not that that has any bearing on my work either.

I do appreciate that we're currently facing the worst health and economic crisis in living memory, that decisions govts make have never had a greater impact on our lives, & that the daily press briefings are a lot more high stakes than pressers may have been in the past.

People are tuning in because these daily events have a profound and immediate impact on their lives and livelihoods, and as journalists, we need to be mindful of that and judicious in the questions we ask.

I don't know whether any of us gets it right all the time, but I certainly try to.

The gravity of the situation we're in is precisely why many of my colleagues and I asked the questions we did yesterday.

While many factors, including global ones, have contributed to the circumstances we're in, we are by the Premier's own admission experiencing a deadly second wave of infections, a significant proportion if not all of which can be traced back to breaches in hotel quarantine.

Until those breaches, we were doing as well as almost any other jurisdiction in the world at suppressing the virus, and I give the Andrews government and their health team credit for that.

But if they're going to get credit for that, they've also got to face some scrutiny over the current situation - particularly over hotel quarantine and contact tracing.

If we're going to learn from the mistakes of the very recent past, we need to ask questions about what went wrong and who was responsible.

The hotel quarantine system as it was has been shut down, but the people who set it up and administered it are the people who are still managing Victoria's response to our worst ever crisis.

Questions from journalists can lead to constructive changes.

It's a small thing and it's hard to be certain, but I doubt it was a coincidence that the government this week removed the loophole that allowed COVID-19 positive people in isolation to leave their houses to exercise, after I'd raised questions about it the previous week.

Press conferences are inevitably confrontational, robust environments, but those of us who are there generally understand and appreciate that we have a job to do, as do politicians, and I suspect things often sound less respectful to the uninitiated than they are in reality.

Sometimes you've got to be the annoying kid at the front of the classroom who keeps calling out in order to get your question in - or at least indicate that you want to ask a question.

I try not to be, but sometimes it's inevitable if you're going to get a question in before things move on to another topic.

It's worth noting also that it's in the Premier's interests to frame things in a way that discredit journalists asking him questions he doesn't want to answer.

He's a politician, it's more or less his job, and I don't take it personally. But people watching at home need to be conscious of that spin. It's also often in his interests to avoid giving proper answers to questions and it's our job to call that out.

It is to @DanielAndrewsMP great credit that he has stood up day in, day out, to take questions from the press, often for more than an hour.

But this is the only form of scrutiny to which a government that has never had more influence over people's lives is currently being subjected.

The lower house of state parliament hasn't sat since mid June and won't sit until September.

Most other workplaces which are able to have had to find ways of doing their jobs remotely. The Andrews government (and the Morrison government, for that matter) hasn't seen fit to try to facilitate this for parliament.

We saw what a farce the one sitting we had of the upper house on Tuesday was with @JennyMikakos's refusals to answer questions.

I hope Monday's sitting of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee will see some good questions asked and answered, but it's important to remember that Labor has half the members on this committee, and the casting vote.

This is reflected in the fact that half hearing time tends to be wasted with dixers, and the bland and broadly positive report handed down last week.

At its best, Twitter can be a brilliant forum for sharing news and ideas and hammering out the issues respectfully. At its worst it's a sewer. And sadly it's far too often at its worst these days.

As a very wise and erudite colleague said of Twitter in a lovely email last night, "the good stuff is candy, the bad stuff is radioactive, and whichever way you cut it there is no nourishment there".

Another quoted the late, great Les Murray: "nothing a mob does is clean". Perhaps that last one applies to press conferences too, but let me tell you, they're hospital-grade disinfected compared with my mentions.

For those reasons, I won't be wasting any more of my weekend off on Twitter, and I'll be using it sparingly - to be alerted to news and for little else - from Monday.

Victoria will get through this, but we'll get through it better with legitimate, rational, respectful scrutiny of the decisions of those in charge. Good night, be kind, over and out.

Oh, and thanks to @PatsKarvelas for hiring me as a cadet almost eight years ago, and to everyone who's given me an opportunity since. I cherish my job in this imperilled industry every day, and I try to do it well.