Supreme Court rules that class action can proceed on Victoria’s hotel quarantine program

Victorian business owners pursuing a class action against the Andrews government over its handling of hotel quarantine have scored a big legal win.

A class action against the Victorian government over its alleged mismanagement of its hotel quarantine program and the coronavirus outbreak that followed will proceed following a Supreme Court ruling.

The class action, brought on behalf of Victorian businesses, hopes to force the government to pay for losses suffered during the state’s second lockdown which began in July 2020.

Victoria went into a statewide lockdown after its quarantine hotels, operated by Unified Security and MSS Security, could not contain infections within the facilities.

A subsequent inquiry into hotel quarantine found the program was responsible for the deaths of 768 people and 18,000 infections.

The hotel quarantine class action has been brought on behalf of Victorian businesses. Picture: Paul Jeffers

The probe also found there were poor health controls put in place and that hotel quarantine was often viewed as a logistics exercise rather than an infectious diseases measure.

Quinn Emanuel partner Damian Scattini, who is leading the class action, said the ruling was an important win for business owners, who are still paying the economic price of lockdowns.

“When the Victorian government decided to run a mandatory hotel quarantine program, it took on a duty to ensure it was managed properly,” Mr Scattini said.

“If the hotel quarantine program had been handled competently by the people in charge, there would not have been a second lockdown.

Premier Daniel Andrews giving evidence to the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry.

“That lockdown decimated businesses and, through this class action, we are giving business owners away to get back some of what they lost.”

He added: “The class action relates to tens of thousands of businesses that provided goods or services to the public from bricks and mortar premises in Victoria and suffered financial loss because of Victoria’s second lockdown.”

A Supreme Court hearing in June was told the businesses sought damages for economic loss after Covid-19 escaped from the Rydges and Stamford Plaza hotels, leading to stage 3 and 4 restrictions during the pandemic’s second wave in 2020.

They claimed that a family of four detained at the Rydges infected a hotel worker and private security staff, who did not wear masks or practice hand hygiene, in May 2020.

Police outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne which was used as a quarantine hotel for tennis players competing in the 2021 Australian Open. Picture: David Geraghty

That family’s illness was epidemiologically linked to eight workers and nine of their contacts, court documents show.

In early June at the Stamford Plaza, it was claimed that a single returned traveller and a couple transmitted the disease to security guards at that hotel.

The next month, the travellers’ infections were linked to cases in 26 workers, a nurse, and 19 household or social contacts.

“Immediately thereafter, there was an upward trend in community infections that was acknowledged as related by genomic sequencing to the failures in the quarantine hotel program earlier alleged. The second wave had begun,” court documents state.

By mid-August, the businesses say that genomic sequencing showed clustering of about 75% of community infections with the quarantine hotel infections.

They argue that “had the (State of Victoria) conducted themselves prudently to the appropriate standard, transmission at each hotel would not have occurred.”

In a ruling on Friday, Justice John Dixon dismissed the State of Victoria’s application for a strike out.

It’s not the first time the government has faced legal action over its alleged mismanagement of its hotel quarantine program.

In September 2021, the health and safety watchdog charged Victoria’s health department with dozens of breaches of the Occupation Health and Safety Act over the quarantine program.

WorkSafe has alleged the Department of Health failed to provide a safe working environment for employees and non-employees and put them at risk.

The department faces up to $95m in fines over its alleged breaches of the act.

Originally published as Supreme Court rules that class action can proceed on Victoria’s hotel quarantine program