Leaked video celebrates Melbourne hotel quarantine program’s success

A leaked in-house video shows a government agency that helped set up Victoria’s bungled hotel quarantine program boasting of its success.

A government agency that helped set up Victoria’s bungled hotel quarantine program has boasted about its success in a bizarre in-house video leaked to the media.

The self-congratulatory video reveals the team at Global Victoria were given about 24 hours to set up the program and treated it as a “massive inbound super trade mission”.

The clip, which was filmed in late April about four weeks after the program was established and played to Department of Jobs, Precincts and the Regions staff on April 24, was leaked to the Herald Sun.

The video seems to show how public servants from the agency, which manages the state’s overseas trade missions, with no experience in public health, were tasked with managing a program that led to a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections.

Global Victoria chief executive Gonul Serbest, who opens the video, said the hotel quarantine program was an “extremely rewarding project to work on”.

A screen grab of Global Victoria CEO Gonul Serbest from the video.

She goes on to say the “fact that we have been able to help slow the spread of coronavirus makes us feel really proud of the work we have been doing”.

At the time the video was filmed 16 hotels were involved in the scheme and about 6000 people had gone through quarantining.

The hotel quarantine program has since been credited with helping start a second wave of virus infections within Victoria and is the subject of a judicial inquiry.

The inquiry’s reporting deadline has now been delayed until November due to Melbourne’s stage four lockdown, but evidence presented on the first day of hearings on July 20 suggested the possibility of a link between many coronavirus cases identified in the Victorian community in the past few weeks and people who were quarantined under the hotel program.

Screen grabs from a video produced by a state government agency Global Victoria celebrating the success of the now botched hotel quarantine in Melbourne.

“Comments made by the chief health officer to the media have suggested that it may even be that every case of COVID-19 in Victoria in recent weeks could be sourced to the hotel quarantine program,” senior counsel assisting the inquiry, Tony Neal, QC, said.

“Increasingly over recent weeks there has been growing and understandable community concern about transmission from that program into the general community.”

Mr Neal said some of the issues already identified were the speed at which the hotel quarantine program had to be established, resourcing and decision making around the contractual arrangements.

Security guards at the Stanford Hotel, Melbourne, which was involved in the hotel quarantine program. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

He said what concerns and complaints emerged regarding the program, to who they were reported and how they were addressed had also been identified as an issue, as well as lines of accountability and the extent of testing of those involved in the program.

Ms Serbest said in the leaked video that Global Victoria staff were suited to the hotel quarantine project as trade was a “business about relationships”.

“We were really able to mobilise our staff who have extensive experience in stakeholder management, dealing with people of different backgrounds and running major events,” she said.

Victoria’s hotel quarantine program has been suspended since its failures were revealed, with flights carrying international returned travellers diverted to other cities across the country, and the city won’t accept any more international flights until at least October 24.