Morrison government rejects WA Premier’s quarantine demand

Morrison government slaps down WA Premier’s call for federal detention centres to be used for quarantine as tensions rise.

The Morrison government has rejected West Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s claims that Commonwealth-owned detention centres should be used to quarantine returning Australians, saying the facilities are already full of people, including serious criminals awaiting deportation.

Mr McGowan on Saturday lashed the Commonwealth for not helping states deal with the cost and risks of quarantining returning Australians. WA has been quarantining 1052 arrivals a week in nine Perth hotels, three of them with ventilation systems deemed high risk. On two occasions since January, coronavirus has escaped from a hotel room — most likely when the door was opened into the hall — and infected others.

“The Commonwealth, states and territories agreed at National Cabinet in March last year that as quarantine arrangements were determined under state and territory health orders, those jurisdictions would manage hotel quarantine,” a government spokesperson said.

“The Commonwealth has contributed to the effort by continuously expanding the Howard Springs facility in the NT since the Halton Review to 850 people a fortnight, and this will expand to 2000 people a fortnight from May.

“As the Premier has been advised, and as Health, Defence and Border Force officials have detailed to the Parliament, Defence bases and immigration centres are unsuitable for quarantining returning Australians.”

The spokesman said this was because Defence bases were operational facilities and the risk to critical defence personnel was not acceptable.

“Defence bases also generally feature austere accomodation facilities with shared dorms and bathrooms making them unsuitable for quarantine purposes. In many cases these facilities are not close to health and intensive care services,” the spokesman said.

“Our immigration network is at capacity with individuals in detention including many Australia is seeking to deport back to their home countries after they committed serious crimes, including sexual assault. Not only are the facilities at capacity, but it would inappropriate and logistically difficult for Australians to have to live alongside such individuals.”

The Morrison government also responded to news that patient zero in the latest Perth outbreak is a man who returned to Australia on April 10 after visiting India for a wedding.

Mr McGowan has expressed disbelief that any Australian can be permitted to go to one of the world’s worst COVID-19 hotspots for a purpose that is not essential.

The National Cabinet on Friday took what the Morrison government describes as decisive action “to further restrict the flow of people out of Australia except for the most urgent circumstances, as well as to reduce the numbers of travellers returning from high risk countries”.

“We will continue to assess the impact of these decisions to ensure hotel quarantine remains a world-leading system to protect Australians against COVID-19,” the Morrison government spokesman said.

People going overseas to attend parties in Covid-ravaged countries: McGowan

On Saturday, WA Premier Mark McGowan urged the Morrison government to take responsibility for quarantine and limit overseas travel to Covid-ravaged countries.

More than two million West Australians were locked down for three days from midnight on Friday after coronavirus escaped the sixth floor room of a couple who had returned from India on April 10 and had quarantined at Perth’s Mercure Hotel.

At least one case of community transmission linked to the outbreak has been detected, as residents of Perth and Peel are urged to come forward en mass to get tested.

Mr McGowan expressed his shock and frustration that the federal government was continuing to allow travel to countries crippled by Covid for non-essential reasons including athletics carnivals in Africa.

He said the infected couple at the centre of the latest outbreak had recently been to India to attend a wedding, with the husband testing positive to coronavirus during a standard Day 2 quarantine swab. The man’s wife tested positive three days later. The virus also spread to other occupants of the hotel, including a tourist from China who later travelled around Perth and on to Melbourne while infected, triggering the three-day lockdown.

Mr McGowan said it was not the man’s fault that coronavirus spread across the corridor of the hotel he was placed in.

“The fact of the matter is the Commonwealth let him go to India recently,” Mr McGowan said.

“I don’t understand why they would do that, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

The Premier said he did not believe people should be allowed to travel to high risk countries for weddings and funerals when Australian governments had prevented their own citizens from attending relatives’ funerals within Australia at the height of the pandemic here.

“People (are) going off to athletics carnivals in parts of Africa and Europe overrun with Covid, and then they want to come back of course.

“It is a risk and so that has to obviously stop.”

Mr McGowan repeated his pleas for the Commonwealth to use facilities such as Christmas Island or the Curtin air base to quarantine returned arrivals, saying hotels were not built for the purpose of medical isolation — a call backed by the Australian Medical Association, which yesterday called for an urgent review of the current “failing” system.

He has also asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison to halve WA’s intake of overseas arrivals from 1025 to 512 people per week, saying his state was quarantining more people per head of population than any other.

Mr McGowan said the Commonwealth had facilities purpose-built for quarantine but was refusing to use them.

“State government picks up the cost and picks up the risk … the Commonwealth doesn’t want to do it,” he said.

“I am getting to the end of my tether with the Commonwealth handing responsibility to the states and not helping.

“We are saying to the Commonwealth it is time they step up.”

WA contract tracers have identified 337 contacts of those infected in the latest outbreak. Of those, 87 people had returned negative test results so far. The virus reached a pregnant mother and four-year-old child quarantining in a room directly across the hall at the Mercure, as well as a 51-year-old man in a room diagonally opposite. That man left quarantine unaware he had the virus, unwittingly infecting a friend who worked at a dental surgery, and then spent five days touring around Perth before going to Melbourne on a flight with 256 other passengers.

Scott Morrison says the number of new COVID-19 cases from India in hotel quarantine has not risen dramatically despite the escalating health crisis in India.

The Prime Minister insisted on Friday the current quarantine system was working well and flagged further announcements on border closures as Canada moved to ban all incoming flights from India for 30 days.

But Indian-Australian business leaders want the government to reconsider reducing flights from India by 30 per cent amid soaring infection rates, arguing that COVID-19 cases should not leak out into the community if the hotel quarantine system is working.

The chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry Australia, Ahbay Mehta, said that, if the hotel quarantine system was functioning as it should, health authorities would be able to detect any cases in incoming passengers from India before they left isolation.

“If it’s working properly then I think it should catch anyone who does come here with COVID-19, so we shouldn’t have to reduce the number of flights by 30 per cent if there was that confidence in the quarantine system,” he said.