Peta Credlin: Time to move quarantine to remote areas

As long as we allow people to return to Australia, our point of vulnerability will always be hotel quarantine. It’s time to relocate it.

Last week’s lockdown in Perth and panic in Melbourne, both over just one person in the community with COVID, shows that we either have to “keep calm and carry on” in response to the occasional case, or find much better ways of stopping the virus from escaping hotel quarantine.

In both the Perth case and the Melbourne case, a hotel quarantine worker was infected despite apparently adhering to all the current infection control protocols meaning the system isn’t foolproof and is probably incapable of being made foolproof unless we radically change its design, given that the staff servicing hotel quarantine will inevitably have hundreds of random interactions as they move around crowded cities.

And that’s before we even contend with the new and more virulent strains of COVID now arriving in Australia.

I’d prefer just to accept that a few cases are inevitable and deal with them like NSW, using effective contact tracing and keeping single suburb lockdowns as a last resort.

But given the climate of fear that’s been created over the past year and most Premiers’ addiction to health protectionism (with no real concern as to the economic hit), it’s a near certainty that keeping returned travellers quarantined in city hotels means that life will never really return to normal, at least without a 100 per cent effective vaccine (which we don’t yet have anywhere in the world).

Perth went into a hard lockdown when a COVID case was discovered at hotel quarantine. Picture: Stefan Gosatti/Getty

And if that’s the case, infections plus panicked Premiers means that lockdowns are inevitable unless we get smarter about who comes into the country, and where they spend their two weeks of quarantine.

Look at the over-reaction to just one case: in Perth, two million people confined to home for 23 hours a day except for “essential” work, with masks still required outdoors even though this supposedly highly infectious case so far has infected no one else; and in Melbourne, Daniel Andrews holding a late night media conference telling people “no need for alarm” even though he foreshadowed “thousands” needing to urgently test and self-isolate, made masks mandatory indoors and slashed to 15 the number of people allowed in private homes.

It was just plain dumb for the Andrews Government to allow hundreds of tennis players, their coaches and various hangers-on to descend on Melbourne.

In almost every press conference last week, the Premier twisted and turned to avoid even saying the word ‘tennis’.

Peta Credlin believe it’s time to move quarantine to remote areas. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

For all the economic benefit the Open brings, it’s dwarfed by just one day of statewide lockdown, so why take the risk? At heart, that’s the issue.

As long as we allow people to return to Australia, our point of vulnerability will always be hotel quarantine; and where these hotels are located in highly populated cities, with workers that live in outer suburbs and travel back and forth, virus escape into the community is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

The only way to keep the virus out of the community is to quarantine people in remote areas where both the returned travellers and the staff supporting them are effectively in isolation.

The Labor states (and now federal Labor) are pushing the PM to quarantine people on Christmas Island and other remote spots because it removes their political vulnerability for failures; and shifts the costs onto the Commonwealth, even though Canberra already picks up the tab, via JobKeeper and JobSeeker, for the states’ decisions to disrupt daily life every time there’s a new infection.

On Friday, despite trying to nudge the national cabinet towards more readily living with risks, but only “in three, six, or nine months’ time”, the Prime Minister described this week’s reaction to these two new cases as “proportionate”.

Peta Credlin. Picture: Sky News

Maintaining hotel quarantine as is, while expanding the former mining camp quarantine site at Howard Springs near Darwin, and investigating the proposal for a new quarantine centre at the Wellcamp airport near Toowoomba, was typical of Morrison’s style of management: not changing anything but offering a concession to keep the critics at bay.

But he was right not to be moved by the bleating of the Queensland and Western Australia Premiers who declared that under the constitution, quarantine is a federal responsibility.

It is, but once people leave airports and ports, they enter state-based health jurisdictions and, anyway, quoting the constitution is a bit rich from Premiers who have never honoured section 92 which is supposed to guarantee free movement between states.

Of course, federal taxpayers should not have to relieve the states of their responsibility to manage quarantine, because that will further reinforce the states’ tendency to insist on doing things their way, but only until something goes wrong; when it’s all buck-passed to Canberra.

But what’s the alternative? A stop-start life, more-or-less indefinitely, at least for another 12-18 months?

If we’re going to permit returning travellers; and if eradication of the virus is to remain the goal of state governments (which, given their populist politics, I can’t see any return to the earlier goal of suppression), it’s time to relocate hotel quarantine out of capital cities.

Just as we are getting back on our feet, we can’t let lockdowns ruin lives and livelihoods all over again.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Time to move quarantine to remote areas