Labor states place the blame on vaccine jabs and hotel quarantine

The Labor states of Victoria and WA have blamed the Morrison government’s delayed vaccine rollout and failure to introduce alternative hotel quarantine facilities for Victoria’s seven-day lockdown.

Victorian Acting Premier James Merlino on Thursday. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

The Labor states of Victoria and Western Australia have blamed the Morrison government’s delayed vaccine rollout and failure to introduce alternative hotel quarantine facilities for Victoria’s coronavirus outbreak and seven-day lockdown.

As Scott Morrison said his government was working “hand-in-glove” with Victoria to protect people’s health and jobs during the “circuit-breaker” lockdown, the state’s Acting Premier, James Merlino, said the vaccine program was “not where we hoped it would be” and circumstances might well be different if more people had been immunised.

He also warned the country would not be out of danger until there were effective alternatives to hotel quarantine.

WA Premier Mark McGowan said states would be safer “if we had a faster rollout of the vaccine and if we had the commonwealth conducting quarantine activity in purpose-built facilities”.

It came as the Prime Minister revealed a Victorian proposal for a 500 or 3000-bed quarantine facility on the outskirts of Melbourne “can be done quicker” than expected.

The Victorian government will pay $15 million for the planning and design work, with expressions of interest put to the construction industry on Friday. Victoria wants the commonwealth to pick up the remaining tab of between $200 million and $700 million.

When the plan was announced in April a final decision on whether to proceed was expected in September, with the build-phase taking four months. “One of the useful elements of this proposal is that it adds to capacity, it is not in place of hotel quarantine,” Mr Morrison said.

He said it was hard to reconcile the view that Victoria would not be in its fourth lockdown if the vaccine rollout – which is running two months behind initial forecasts – had not been delayed.

Australia is due to surpass four million doses this week – a target that was meant to be reached by March.

Mr Morrison pointed to countries like France, Canada and Singapore that had begun vaccination programs well before Australia and continued to face lockdowns.

“The challenges that the Health Minister in Victoria, (Martin Foley) and indeed the Acting Premier, noted about the (vaccine) program today related to the supply issues out of Europe and … ATAGI’s advisory regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine. They are the reasons that were identified by the Victorian government,” he said.

Anthony Albanese said the Victorian lockdown was particularly tough because it could have been avoided.

“The government had two jobs this year: to get quarantine right and to get the rollout of the vaccine right,” he said.