Paul Starick: Repurpose Woomera detention centre for COVID-19 quarantine

Why risk an outbreak by having a quarantine hotel in the middle of the city? Woomera, hundreds of kilometres away, would have everything we need, Paul Starick writes.

The former Woomera immigration detention centre should be considered as a quarantine bubble for repatriated Australians to severely restrict chances for COVID-19 to leak into capital cities.

Putting a quarantine facility in a well-serviced yet isolated town with a military airstrip would lessen the risk of a major virus flare-up in a large population centre.

Adelaide’s outbreak has been triggered by a cleaner who contracted the virus at a medi-hotel and intensified by an infectious quarantine security guard working a second job at Woodville Pizza Bar.

Premier Steven Marshall on Thursday said this had prompted a quarantine review, including whether medi-hotel staff should be restricted from working at other sites, as aged care staff have been in South Australia.

But that restriction prevents contagious people importing COVID-19 into aged care centres and infecting highly vulnerable residents. It is very difficult to prevent infectious quarantine hotel staff exporting the virus into the capital city communities in which they live and unleashing an outbreak.

Aerial view of Woomera Detention Centre for asylum seekers, featured in Department of Immigration advertising campaign in June 2000.

Police Commissioner Grant Stevens, also the state co-ordinator during the COVID-19 emergency, said it was an unreasonable expectation that security guards, police officers, nurses, caterers, cleaners and other medi-hotel staff “will be isolated from the rest of the community while they’re providing that service”.

As Mr Stevens said, the first level of risk mitigation is not allowing infected people to return to Australia. Having accepted that, as he said, the community’s obligation is to manage that risk as much as possible.

“But this is an insidious virus that is highly contagious. People with decades of experience in the health sector catch this virus when they’re treating people with the disease,” he said.

Therefore, there is a risk from these workers mixing in a capital city community – shopping, filling up at petrol stations and so on – even if they did not have second jobs.

Camp Rapier, as the Woomera detention centre became known, pictured in 2009.

Repurposing and reopening the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in SA’s Far North would diminish this risk by isolating workers in a bubble.

Woomera, 190km northwest of Port Augusta, was designed as a closed town for defence and space testing, launches and research. It was a restricted area until 1982 and had a checkpoint at the town’s entrance.

It is about 7km from the Adelaide to Darwin railway and the Stuart Highway, the only incoming road. The Woomera Defence Range Complex includes an airstrip capable of landing the world’s largest planes, including the Boeing 767 that transferred the first group of asylum seekers to the detention centre in November, 1999.

Woomera has, at various times, supported large defence operations, the nearby, defunct United States Nurrungar spy base and a detention centre housing almost 1500 people.

Camp Rapier, which the detention centre site became known as, is now a secure garrison support and specialised training compound within the Woomera Prohibited Area.

A quarantine facility could be scaled up to ensure staff remained in the town bubble, rather than risk spreading the virus throughout capital cities. Just as mining workers do, they could fly in and fly out with appropriate medical checks.

This would be a significant operation to set up but the virus is surging across Europe and the US, with the prospect of a population-wide vaccine many months away.

A National Review of Hotel Quarantine, which reported in October, recommended a national quarantine facility for emergency situations, evacuations or “urgent scalability”. Woomera should be considered alongside the Northern Territory’s Howard Springs.

The COVID-19 crisis is not going away and nor will the risks from hotel quarantine. There is a potential solution on our doorstep, that should be seriously examined.

A distraught man holds his children at a hotel window at Peppers medi-hotel, Adelaide, on November 17. Picture: The Australian, Morgan Sette