Coronavirus: Troops there for you, Scott Morrison told Daniel Andrews
Scott Morrison appealed to Daniel Andrews to accept an offer of 1000 ADF personnel in July, newly released documents reveal.
Scott Morrison personally appealed to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews to accept an offer of 1000 Australian Defence Force personnel in July as the state’s second wave of COVID-19 took hold, newly released letters reveal.
Obtained by Sky News through Freedom of Information laws, the letters — sent on July 4, 6 and 11 — show the Prime Minister’s increasing concern with an escalating number of coronavirus cases and the state’s ability to contain the outbreak.
On July 11, Mr Morrison said about 1000 ADF personnel could work with Victoria Police in a combined operation to help respond to the crisis and reassure the community.
“It is critical to the containment of the virus that the now thousands of people in isolation and quarantine are carefully tracked by phone and personal visits to ensure compliance (and their welfare),” he said.
“The remainder of the ADF personnel you requested in your letter of 7 July, 2020, remain available to be deployed in Victoria once Victorian officials have finalised their planning and preparation activities.
“Given the escalating COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria, I recommend you again consider further ADF deployment to Melbourne over coming days to assist in the enforcement of public health compliance.
“A model successfully used in previous deployments in other jurisdictions involves an ADF member paired with a police officer in a team of two. This allows the legal enforcement powers to be exercised by state and territory police, supported by ADF members. It will allow a significant expansion of compliance and welfare activity.
“The VicPol/ADF team model could also quickly be deployed to expand the ability to support containment rings around Metropolitan Melbourne/Hume Shire.”
Mr Morrison also said he was mindful of the “positive and reassuring impact the presence of the ADF can have’’.
Offers of commonwealth support were also made on July 4 before Melbourne re-entered a stage-three lockdown that was meant to last only six weeks, for planning and logistics, clinical efforts, community engagement and contact tracing.
In his July 4 letter, Mr Morrison also said that previous outbreaks in northwest Tasmania and Sydney had demonstrated that local health systems could be quickly overwhelmed.
“I also note that the commonwealth stands ready to support Victoria through the Australian Defence Force to assist with the lockdown of affected suburbs and to assist to ensure persons from these areas do not travel outside these zones and to other states,” he said.
“It is concerning that there have been a number of cases where such travellers have been identified entering NSW in particular.’'
The departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Defence made a 149-page submission to Victoria’s hotel quarantine inquiry confirming the letters existed.
Mr Andrews has stood by his statement to a parliamentary committee hearing that it was “fundamentally incorrect to assert there was hundreds of ADF staff on offer and somehow someone said no” at the start of the pandemic.
On July 6, the Premier announced that ADF strategic planners and logisticians would be deployed to Victoria’s State Control Centre, alongside ADF personnel already embedded with Emergency Management Victoria, to help co-ordinate the lockdown of nine public housing towers.
Two days later, he announced 264 ADF members would assist “with on-ground operations, focusing on staging areas, planning, logistics and transport” as part of Victoria Police’s Operation Sentinel effort to enforce stage-three stay-at-home restrictions in Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire.
In a joint statement released on July 14, the Prime Minister and Premier confirmed that a further 1000 ADF personnel would be deployed to Victoria to support the coronavirus response, following the state’s acceptance on July 12 of an offer from the commonwealth.
On July 24, the Andrews government announced it had sought assistance from the ADF of a further 1400 ADF personnel.
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