Wellcamp quarantine hub: Acting Premier Steven Miles has ‘no regrets over now-unneeded facility

The Acting Premier says he doesn’t regret spending $200 million on the now-unnecessary Wellcamp quarantine hub, hitting out at Opposition Leader David Crisafulli for being “that bloke on TV whinging about how we were more prepared than we needed to be”.

Steven Miles says he doesn’t regret spending $200 million on the now-unnecessary Wellcamp quarantine hub, saying it is better to be over prepared.

The Acting Premier likened building the hub to scouring the world for ventilators that ultimately weren’t needed and accused Opposition Leader David Crisafulli of being “that bloke on TV whinging about how we were more prepared than we needed to be”.

Mr Miles’s attack followed the Opposition describing the hub as a waste of money after it housed just a fraction of people it can cater for in the 65 days it’s been open ahead of international and close-contact quarantine restrictions dropping on Friday.

“There have been a lot of stages of the pandemic where our response has required doing what we think might be necessary without necessarily knowing whether it will,” Mr Miles said.

“There have been a lot of stages where I’ve really hoped that what we were doing wouldn’t be necessary.

“There were months there where we were scouring the world to buy every single available ventilator – and that cost money – but ultimately we didn’t need those ventilators.

“I don’t regret buying them one iota, they are in our system, they are available and if we had needed them, they would have been there to treat Queenslanders.”

The State Governments Wellcamp quarantine facility. Picture: Kevin Farmer

He said the government only decided to fund Wellcamp after months of asking the Commonwealth to do so.

But Opposition deputy leader Jarrod Bleijie lambasted the government’s “latest excuse” – that it needed the facility to house infected cruise ship passengers.

He said it made far more sense for sick passengers to be taken to the federal government’s soon-to-be-open Pinkenba facility close to the cruise ship terminal, rather than bus people from Brisbane to Toowoomba.

“They are making excuses up to keep the Wellcamp quarantine facility going,” he said.

“They are making excuses up to justify the $200m waste that they have wasted of Queensland taxpayers’ money.”

He said $200m could have bought more than 100 ICU bed, or employed more than 2000 police recruits, graduate nurses and medical interns.

“These are real jobs that would help alleviate the health crisis that we've got in Queensland,” he said.

It came as new photos showed ambulances and police cars ramped at the Princess Alexandra Hospital on Saturday night.

Mr Miles admitted it was still a “challenging time for our health system”, with the average ramping time at 33 minutes – over the 30 minute target.

“In the last week or so we’ve seen continuing record demand on our hospital system,” he said.

“That’s not too surprising.
“This is the time of year where hospital demand usually does ramp up, peeking towards the middle of the year.”

He said there were still hundreds of patients in hospital with Covid and about 300 health staff furloughed because of the virus.