Annastacia Palaszczuk would look a lot better on that high horse were her own state government not culpable for the failures that plunged another 3.8 million Australians into Covid lockdown overnight.
The Premier’s demand for Scott Morrison to choke off what remains of international travel is a hypocritical exercise in blame-shifting when the Queensland authorities are so woefully at fault.
It was bad enough the fly-in fly-out miner who is patient zero in the cluster that has brought down the shutters in Darwin and Perth contracted the virus from a quarantine hotel in Brisbane.
But the mind boggles at how a 19-year-old receptionist could have been allowed anywhere near a hospital Covid ward when she was unvaccinated.
It’s not like the transmission risk was remote.
Back in March, in the lead-up to the last lot of school holidays to go south in the Sunshine State, containment breaches at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital infected two nurses and a doctor, who in turn seeded the virus into the community and forced Palaszczuk to order a 72-hour lockdown of the city.
As a result, all hospital staff with exposure to Covid patients – and there are a lot of them in Queensland because the policy is to hospitalise anyone who tests positive – were to be vaccinated.
But this unfortunate young woman was not required to have the jab because, as the Premier explained, her work station was “located outside” the isolation ward at Prince Charles Hospital, a case of mealy-mouthed hair-splitting if ever there was one.
The woman herself bears a level of responsibility but it pales against the obligation of her managers to ensure she was vaccinated. Then there is the question of her being sick while at work on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, before she flew to Townsville for a family holiday. Any number of doctors or nurses from the Covid ward must have walked past the reception desk. Didn’t someone notice she was ill?
Palaszczuk is right to profess fury at the blunder – just as she is entitled to go after the Prime Minister over the snail-paced vaccine rollout, and whether the hotel quarantine system is fit for purpose to handle the virulent mutant variants. But she needs to get her own house in order first. Owning up to Queensland’s mistakes would be a start.
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