Managing $1.3bn white elephants

Despite the homelessness crisis and a shortage of domestic violence shelters, Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience – an expensive testament to bad planning during the Covid pandemic response – is a ghost town near the Hume Highway on the city’s northern fringe far from public transport.

The Orwellian-sounding centre, which has about 1000 beds and 500 security cameras, is all but deserted and maintained by a skeleton staff at public expense while the Albanese government struggles to decide what to do with it, apart from ensuring such waste is never replicated.

As the Covid-19 Response Inquiry Report shows, this and similar centres in Perth and Brisbane were built during the pandemic at a cost to taxpayers of $1.37bn.

But “unfortunately the decision to construct these centres happened too late to meaningfully contribute to the Covid-19 national quarantine program”, the report concedes.

The first stage of completion at the $600m Melbourne site (250 beds) was achieved in December 2021, with contract completion in March 2022: “When completed, the Melbourne site provided 1000 beds, the Perth site 500 beds and the Brisbane site 500 beds. To date, only the Victorian site has been used for quarantine purposes.”

The mini-city temporarily housed only 2100 people during the Covid crisis, John Ferguson reports. It was a waste of scarce resources and built in the wake of inexcusable management mistakes in Victoria’s botched hotel quarantine program, blamed for contributing to the deaths of more than 760 people.

This and similar centres may or may not prove useful during another pandemic. The Centres for National Resilience “will need to be managed alongside other infrastructure and capability to properly implement any future national quarantine and resilience programs,” the Covid-19 Response Inquiry Report found.

“Unless these facilities are used in ways that can also enable their operation as training facilities for a surge quarantine workforce, we risk these sites becoming dormant and impossible to scale up for quarantine service in a timely way,” the report says.

“One of the key limiting considerations for quarantine facilities is access to an appropriately trained workforce.” In other words, if the Centres for National Resilience are to be useful for quarantine in future, even more taxpayer money may need to be spent.

Enough is enough. The federal and Victorian governments must find an appropriate use for the large Melbourne facility if the investment is to provide value for taxpayers. That could prove difficult.

The Department of Finance has a deal with the Victorian government to enable the site to be used for accommodation during crises such as floods and fires. It was last used by the state government during the aftermath of the October 2022 Victorian flood crisis.

As we said recently, the lasting legacy of Australia’s Covid pandemic response has been an erosion of public trust in politicians and our institutions. The costly and so far futile legacy of Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience will only deepen that public sense of frustration and mistrust.