Hotel quarantine exemptions lay bare how we treat rich and poor

Lifestyles! Of the rich and famous. They’re always complaining … they’re always complaining … as they stroll around their 45-hectare rural properties enjoying the fresh air as they undergo the mandatory 14-day quarantine at the luxury abode of their choice.

From Nicole Kidman spending two weeks at her sprawling Southern Highlands estate, to Dannii Minogue receiving a medical exemption due to claustrophobia and allowed to quarantine at her home, Hollywood star Tom Hanks shacking up in a Gold Coast resort, and Mark Wahlberg opting for a luxury Byron Bay pad, it seems those with famous faces and big bank accounts are allowed to escape being locked up in a small box in a hotel for two weeks with nothing but sugar sachets and a tin flute for company – while paying thousands of dollars for the experience.

Nicole Kidman was able to quarantine at her sprawling Southern Highlands property.Credit: AP

It’s not just Hollywood A-Listers and TV stars who get a different set of rules. Billionaire media mogul Kerry Stokes and his wife were also granted an exemption to self-quarantine at home after they arrived in Western Australia by private jet from a trip to the Colorado ski fields, while British billionaire Lord Alan Sugar avoided mandatory hotel quarantine when he and his wife Ann Simons landed here in September – although he did have an important job to do as the new host of Celebrity Apprentice Australia.

While there has been an outcry from the Australian public about the fact that there seems to be one rule for the rich and one for the poor, one would have to ask, are you surprised?

The notion that people across the socioeconomic spectrum would be treated equally in our wide brown land is a bit of a furphy, or possibly a fantasy that we tell our children before they grow up to realise the truth. Whether it’s Indigenous woman Tanya Day being locked up for being drunk in public while we accept this behaviour yearly at the Melbourne Cup due to the event’s boost to the economy, there are certain benefits that wealth and whiteness get you in this country.

Let’s look at the recent finding by Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass in her investigation into the sudden lockdown of the public housing towers in Melbourne. In a move which was found to violate human rights, the residents of the towers were locked up without warning during the second wave of COVID-19, while the rest of the city’s citizens were given time to collect the necessities and prepare themselves.

Then you have the homeless people of Melbourne who were housed in hotel accommodation during COVID lockdown, but have since been turfed out onto the streets – their welfare no longer such a pressing issue.

Of course, there are people who are deservedly granted exemptions from hotel quarantine. Airline crews, foreign diplomats, Australian government officials and unaccompanied minors are allowed to self-isolate at home, as are those with “strong compassionate or medical grounds”.

But these exemptions are rarely granted to the average Australian, despite increasing mental health concerns about the hotel quarantine program.

It’s nice to think of a world where the rich and powerful are meted out the same treatment as those stuck at the bottom of the ladder. But it's hard to see a world where that will happen any time soon.

Emily Day is Deputy Opinion Editor at The Age.