Political trickery: Mayor didn’t even know about quarantine plan

The Palaszczuk government’s announcement that they’ve quietly started building quarantine facility near Toowoomba – without telling anyone, including the local mayor – smacks of political chicanery, writes The Editor.

The Courier-Mail welcomes anything that will ensure fewer people are put into hotel quarantine – a system that was meant to be a short-term solution to a pandemic problem which has lasted much longer than any of us had hoped.

But the announcement yesterday that the Palaszczuk government has quietly started building a 1000-bed quarantine facility near Toowoomba – without telling anyone, including the local mayor – smacks of political chicanery.

Not only will taxpayers never know the cost of the massive facility, because that is deemed commercial in confidence, the bigger concern is the fact – revealed exclusively today in The Courier-Mail – that the state government’s own bureaucrats had warned it needed a guarantee from the commonwealth that flights would land at Wellcamp Airport in order for the facility to be “adequately utilised”.

No such guarantee has been secured and the Deputy Premier acknowledged the government only had “hope” that airlines would choose to land at Wellcamp.

This means people will likely need to be bussed from Brisbane to Toowoomba, a 90-minute journey public servants said would create “further exposure risks”.

And it all comes after the federal government rejected plans for the same 1000-bed facility because it lacked adequate detail.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk at the site of a quarantine hub that will be built at Wellcamp Airport in Toowoomba with site owners John and Joe Wagner. Picture: Queensalnd Government, Jack Tran

Now, the Premier has come out with the same plan, without even telling the PM what the government was doing.

If the Palaszczuk government was so keen on setting up a regional quarantine hub, why didn’t it just bite the bullet and fund the entire project when it was first mooted back in January?

Instead, the commonwealth and state have squabbled over funding and all while the foibles and dangers of hotel quarantine were exposed.

Now we have this juvenile game of finger-pointing being played out daily between the federal and state governments, whether it be over the pace of the vaccination rollout, snap lockdowns, border closures or quarantine protocols.

Just a day after the Premier announced a 14-day “pause’’ to people coming into hotel quarantine into Queensland from NSW, Victoria, and the ACT, we see this announcement.

Cynics might suggest the optics were pretty clear – the Premier wanted to demonstrate that the hotel quarantine system was failing, and that this new Toowoomba facility was the answer and that Canberra had abandoned us and only the Labor government had the answers.

This is despite 500 beds not being available until January 1 and the other 500 beds available before March next year.

Does this also suggest the state government believes we are in for a long, hard road ahead with 14-day regional quarantine stints now the norm?

Does this also mean the Queensland government is not going to provide so-called “freedom passports” even if we get to 80 per cent vaccination rates?

Does it mean the eradication strategy is alive and well within state cabinet and that the PM’s call that we must “live with the virus” has fallen on deaf ears in Queensland?

These are all legitimate queries, and they will raise concerns among the public that snap lockdowns and snap lockouts for those wanting to return are likely to be more common.

In her announcement, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said: “It could have been built by now,” in a swipe at the PM after the federal government deemed the Wellcamp proposal “unsuitable” in June.

Yet the commonwealth is committed to building the Pinkenba quarantine facility and it provided hundreds of billions of dollars in support during the pandemic’s early dark days in 2020.

Now, changing the goalposts again, the Palaszczuk government has laid the groundwork to back away from the national cabinet’s four-phase plan to open borders and get the country back to a semblance of normality.

In the meantime, businesses are going broke, especially those around Coolangatta-Tweed, as border closures wreak havoc.

The relationship between the commonwealth and the states is broken and yesterday’s announcement clearly demonstrated that.

The unfortunate losers are ordinary Queenslanders.