PM says an idea for a Gladstone quarantine camp not ‘sensible’

Scott Morrison has canned an idea to use a Gladstone mining camp for returning overseas Aussies but says Toowoomba is still an option.

SCOTT Morrison has ruled out using a Gladstone mining camp to quarantine Australians returning from overseas but said Toowoomba remained an option for providing “supplementary capacity”.

The Prime Minister said a plan to use a Gladstone mining camp for quarantine proposed by the Queensland Government was short on detail and he did not believe it was “a sensible thing to do”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a press conference in the Prime Minister's Courtyard at Parliament House on February 4, 2021. Pic: Sam Mooy/Getty Images

“There wasn’t a lot of detail on that, but the broader risks, economically or particularly from a health point of view, were ones that we thought could not be appropriately covered off,” he said.

Mr Morrison said the government was “working through” a proposal to quarantine returning Australians in Toowoomba and would soon respond in writing to Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk about the plan.

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But he warned that the current hotel quarantine system set up around major international airports had to form the backbone of the system to all Australians to return home safely.

“This idea that you can replace the hotel quarantine system, bring Australians back home, manage your health agenda effectively through some other mechanism, I think we have to keep a sense of realism about this and a sense of proportion,” he said.

He said 211,500 Australians had returned from overseas following the closing of the international border in March last year and just a “handful” of cases had not been “completely contained within that”.