Annastacia Palaszczuk goes it alone on Wellcamp quarantine facility

Annastacia Palaszczuk blindsided just about everyone when she announced Queensland would go its own way and back a Covid-19 quarantine centre on the Darling Downs.

Annastacia Palaszczuk and Wellcamp owners John Wagner and Joe Wagner at the site of a quarantine hub at Wellcamp Airport on Thursday. Picture: Jack Tran

Annastacia Palaszczuk blindsided just about everyone when she announced Queensland would go its own way and back a controversial regional Covid-19 quarantine centre on the Darling Downs, west of Brisbane.

Scott Morrison didn’t get a heads-up and nor did the veteran Toowoomba mayor Paul Antonio, who admitted to being “caught off guard” by the Queensland government’s decision to ¬elevate his range-top city to the frontline against the pandemic.

But the state-federal, Labor-Liberal politics playing out over the pandemic is as hard and fast as the lockdowns that usually follow the hotel quarantine breaches Ms Palaszczuk says warrant construction of the centre.

On the other side of the country, another border brawl was breaking out – this time between Mark McGowan and Qantas boss Alan Joyce, after the airline said it was considering rerouting the London-Perth flight to Darwin because of the state’s “conservative” approach to the pandemic.

“Outrageous,” said the West Australian Premier, adding his government had spent $15m to upgrade Perth airport to secure the flights in the first place.

The 1000-bed Queensland facility – to be built by the billionaire Wagner family beside their privately owned Wellcamp airport and then run by the state – has been at the centre of a months-long row between Ms Palaszczuk and the Prime Minister. Mr Morrison has refused to support the facility – sitting in the safe Liberal-held seat of Groom – with his government, instead, going ahead with a facility at Pinkenba, in the Labor-held marginal seat of Lilley, on Brisbane’s outskirts.

With Pinkenba not opening before at least June next year Ms Palaszczuk says she couldn’t wait and took up the Wagners’ offer to have 500 beds ready by Christmas. “This is a race,’’ she said at Wellcamp, in front of heavy equipment that had just finished turning soil for the cameras.

“We are up against a highly infectious Delta variant that’s sweeping the world. We need regional quarantine facilities. I have been advocating for this for a long, long time. It is a no-brainer.”

Ms Palaszczuk was waving away the commonwealth concerns about Wellcamp – there is no traffic control tower or fire service, and the airport is far from a major hospital – and her failure to alert Mr Morrison of the plan. “If you build it, they will come,’’ she said, adding Wellcamp already took international freight, and patients with Covid-19 would be taken to ¬Brisbane.

Mr Morrison, speaking after the announcement, said if the Queensland government was willing to go ahead without federal assistance, it should have done so months ago.

“We have made it very clear that that facility did not meet the national guidelines, and that is why we are going forward together at Pinkenba,” he said.

The original regional quarantine proposal, in fact, was to use an existing workers’ camp outside Gladstone. It soon vanished in the face of community opposition because of its location in the marginal Nationals-held seat of Flynn, expected to be a tight contest at the next election.

In recent days, Ms Palaszczuk laid the groundwork for the surprise announcement by suspending hotel quarantine check-ins for two weeks, saying the system was too stretched.

Shortly after hotel quarantine was “paused”, federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese tweeted: “Scott Morrison still hasn’t built a single new quarantine facility 18 months into the pandemic.’’

The Queensland government had hoped that the Wagners and Deputy Premier Steven Miles could announce the Wellcamp plans earlier this month at the commonwealth-owned Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory, regarded as the “gold standard” of quarantine centres. That was called-off when the NT went into a three-day lockdown.

Mr Antonio would not publicly comment on the politics of the announcement, but said he was disappointed to learn of the plan only through a press conference on Thursday.