Opinion: State wasted opportunity on preferred quarantine centre site

“With this constant pushing of the Toowoomba site it makes you wonder if this is just another attempt of the age old habit of QLD politicians bashing Canberra at every opportunity.”

Deputy Premier of Queensland Steven Miles during a press conference in Brisbane. Picture: Tertius Pickard

What is it about the proposed Toowoomba Quarantine Centre that Dr. Steven Miles our Deputy Premier rates so highly as does our Premier?

They have been told on many occasions that it does not comply with the Commonwealth health requirements due to two important factors.

The first being that the airport does not have regular overseas incoming flights and secondly that Toowoomba does not have a large well equipped hospital.

For those reasons alone as a site for a quarantine centre it is useless, not so, says Minister Miles, it is perfect.

One would assume that the minister would be a qualified person in medical requirements to pursue his line of reasoning but research shows that his formal qualifications are as a PhD and a Bachelor of Political Science and Journalism at Queensland University his PhD thesis was on Union Renewal.

Prior to his election in 2015 he ran a small business he also worked as the Industrial Relations Director and Lead Organiser for the QPSU for a number of years prior, he is 43 years old with no medical qualifications.

With this constant pushing of the Toowoomba site it makes you wonder if this is just another attempt of the age old habit of QLD politicians bashing Canberra at every opportunity.

The preferred QLD site was finally extinguished on June 25th by the Federal Government with the Prime Minister offering to pay for a purpose built 1000 bed quarantine facility to be built on Defence land at Pinkenba which is close to Brisbane Airport and of course major hospitals.

After this announcement was made it attracted overwhelming public support.

The Courier Mail ran a poll that attracted 1846 votes that gave an approval rating of 93%.

What was the state governments response? Minister Steven Miles said that they had looked at the site on Google Maps but they would need to have people on the ground to look at it.

It should be noted that the site is a 21 minute drive from State Parliament.

One would have thought that what should have happened was that the State Government should have gained some political mileage out of it.

Our Premier should have announced publicly what a terrific win it was for our state with Canberra producing the land and paying for the building of the facility that she had been pushing for.

Talk about a wasted opportunity and we all thought that she was politically savvy enough to capitalise on the moment.

All politics aside this is a major step forward and should herald a new wave of co-operation between the groups which is for all our benefits and that should be carried on through with the inoculation process as well.

We are talking about our populations health not some silly game so wake up Minister Miles and just shut up about Toowoomba as it is now dead and buried and get on with the job.

Charles Brown, Burnett Downs

Originally published as Opinion: State wasted opportunity on preferred quarantine centre site