Steven Miles says Scott Morrison using vaccine rollout to distract from Canberra culture crisis

Deputy Premier Steven Miles says the Greater Brisbane lockdown could probably have been avoided if Prime Minister Scott Morrison had supported the Queensland Government’s plans for a quarantine centre at Toowoomba. Four new COVID cases were recorded overnight.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles has taken aim at Prime Minister Scott Morrison for using the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to district from the issue of the treatment of women in Canberra.

Mr Miles repeated calls for the establishment of a national quarantine centre at Wellcamp near Toowoomba to deal with returning international travellers who may have the virus.

Mr Miles said having such a centre would mean that the number of international arrivals would not have to be cut every time Queensland had a COVID-19 outbreak.

“That will continue to be on the agenda,” he said.

“Unfortunately we can’t get a straight answer or even a statement of support in principle out of the Commonwealth, out of Scott Morrison.

“In particular, we need the support to allow repatriation flights to land at Toowoomba.

“If we got that go ahead when we first suggested this, we probably wouldn’t have needed the lockdown last week.”

Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: Dan Peled

It comes after Queensland recorded four new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, all acquired overseas and detected in hotel quarantine.

The state currently has 75 active cases of COVID with more than 7500 tests in the past 24 hours.

Mr Miles said one of the new cases had been in Papua New Guinea, one had returned from Lebanon and two from India.

Mr Miles said Queensland had been “incredibly successful” in saving lives from COVID-19, with six people dying from the pandemic virus.

Mr Miles said it was a bumper weekend for tourism across the state, with tens of thousands of visitors to Cairns.

“It’s wonderful that Queenslanders and southerners have supported our tourism regions,” Mr Miles said.

Mr Miles said 11 campers and a dog were rescued from Byfield National Park, north of Yeppoon, overnight after they became stranded when water rose around their camp ground.

“The system that we had feared would move across the (southeast) coast has instead moved away and continues to drift further away,” Mr Miles said.

“Our main message now is for people to please drive safe, please take care on the roads.”

Deputy chief health officer Dr Sonya Bennett said it was pleasing there had been no further community acquired cases.

She said the testing rates dipped yesterday to about 7,500 tests in the 24 hours to this morning.

Deputy chief health officer Dr Sonya Bennett. Picture: Richard Walker

She said she would like people to continue to be tested for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, if they needed to.

“If anyone has any symptoms at all, go along and get a test.

“We’ve still got a period of time before we can be absolutely confident that we don’t have any more community transmission.”

Dr Bennett said an “environmental event” could be responsible for two clusters at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, which were under investigation.

She said in 14 days if Queensland had no more locally acquired cases, health authorities could be “reasonably confident” the outbreaks were under control.

It comes after one new case was detected in hotel quarantine on Sunday. It was acquired overseas.

Dr Bennett yesterday said health authorities were confident they had southeast Queensland’s two COVID clusters linked to the Princess Alexandra Hospital under control.

Queensland Health last night confirmed an engineering analysis would be conducted into PA Hospital’s Ward 5D to examine “possible factors which may have contributed to virus transmission”.