Labor shutters Covid white elephant

Queensland’s obsolete quarantine facility will likely remain empty until the Palaszczuk government’s lease ends next April.

Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Queensland’s obsolete quarantine facility will likely remain empty until the Palaszczuk government’s lease ends next April, while the state’s taxpayers continue to pay tens of millions of dollars in rent each month.

The 1000-bed Wellcamp quarantine facility, which has already cost taxpayers $223.5m and has housed only 730 people, will be shuttered from Monday.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles said the state had been trying to find another use for the site since it opened in February but had been unsuccessful.

The government has assessed alternative uses for the Wellcamp centre, near Toowoomba, but the facility was “unsuitable” for some proposed options, including a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre and accommodation for the homeless or domestic violence victims.

“The nature of a quarantine facility is that it is designed to keep people apart,” Dr Miles said.

“When you are, for example, trying to take care of the homeless and victims of domestic violence, you want to wrap services as close to them as you can.

“We’ll continue to assess (the options) and if any are suitable, the facility will be there for that use.”

The family-owned Wagner Corporation, which owns the ­adjacent airport, won the contract for the regional quarantine centre without going through an open tender process.

State taxpayers have paid Wagner $198.5m to help build the centre, then lease it back for 12 months.

Chairman John Wagner has said the centre could be used to house agriculture workers and eventually used as accommodation for the family’s proposed $175m entertainment precinct.

The Palaszczuk government has already committed $40m to develop the precinct, which would include a racetrack and 40,000-person performing arts venue.

Mr Wagner would not say how much money the company had invested in the Wellcamp quarantine centre but believed it was “good value for money”.

“The only reason it is a reasonable investment is because we have got the likes of the Wellcamp Entertainment Precinct, which is a motorsports facility, coming up and we can utilise it there,” he told ABC radio.

“It could easily be used for ­accommodation for the entertainment precinct.”

Mr Wagner defended the Palas­zczuk government’s decision to push ahead with Wellcamp when the commonwealth already proposed plans for another facility at Damascus Barracks in the Brisbane suburb of Pinkenba, closer to the international airport and tertiary hospitals.

“They tried to do the right thing when everyone said we needed more accommodation, and now they were supposed to have been able to look into a ­crystal ball and work out what to do next – it is a very complicated situation,” he told ABC radio.

“They will continue to pay the lease; that is how leases work. You enter into a 12-month lease and you have to pay the rent until the 12 months is up.”

The Pinkenba facility is still under construction.

Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said Wellcamp was “waste in the highest degree”.

“The Wagners have been given a couple of hundred million bucks for an asset that only 700 people used and it is now their asset.

“Of course they should be pleased with that. I don’t begrudge the Wagners, not one iota.

“The person I have a beef with is Dr Miles, who can’t plan and who doesn’t value taxpayers’ money.”

Dr Miles said his only regret was that the facility wasn’t built sooner. “If we had built it sooner, it would have been available sooner, and Queenslanders would have been safer,” he said.

“Throughout the entire pandemic, we took a be-prepared ­approach and I don’t regret anything about that.”