The NSW government says it will put up its hand for a quarantine facility after locked-down Victoria secured an agreement with the Commonwealth for one last week, but Queensland remains out in the cold.
NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet says that as his state has done the heavy lifting regarding hotel quarantining, setting up a facility may assist over the next 12 months to alleviate pressure on its hotel system.
“That is something we should look at,” Mr. Perrottet told reporters in Sydney on Sunday.
“The federal government has said it will support these types of facilities in other states, and we want to work to a proposal that makes sense and keeps our people safe.” Mr. Perrottet said, “The next 12 months will be very different from the last 12 months,” and said the state would propose to the federal government. “We’ve been incredibly successful during this pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that we rest on our laurels and sit still; we need to evolve our thinking and look at new ways of doing things,” he said.
There are currently around 5,000 people in hotel quarantine in NSW.
But federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said that NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was “not at this point… seeking any additional quarantine facility”.
“They have done the heavy lifting on behalf of the nation,” he told reporters on Sunday.
“They have done an incredible job in bringing people home and bringing people home safely. So the PM [Scott Morrison] has confirmed with the premier that at this point, they’re not seeking any additional quarantine facility in New South Wales.” Labor leader Anthony Albanese said national government-run, purpose-built quarantine facilities should have been in place last year. “That was the best time to do this; the best next time is right now,” he told Sky News’s Sunday Agenda program.
He pointed out that building quarantine facilities is Labor policy, as announced in last month’s budget reply speech. This needs to fix now, not wait until after the next federal election, which will occur perhaps as late as May of next year,” he said.
“We can’t afford to keep having these lockdowns.
His deputy Richard Marles says there is just one purpose-built facility in Australia, Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, which unsurprisingly has no COVID-19 breakouts, while there have been 21 or 22 from hotels over the past year. “Fit-for-purpose facilities should be doing the bulk of the work,” he told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.
Victoria’s 14-day lockdown is due to end on Thursday.
The state reported two new infections on Sunda and six cases among overseas travelers currently in hotel quarantine. The Commonwealth has agreed to meet the capital costs for a 500-bed facility in outer Melbourne while Victoria would cover operational costs.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the proposal is “a very “ood” one.
T”e federal government is understood to favor Avalon as the ideal location for the facility because the Victorian governmegovernment’sed Mickleham site already has an animal quarantine facility. However, while VictoriaVictoria’sl formed an 80-page document, QueenslaQueensland’sl is believed to have been scant in detail. But Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told QueenslaQueensland’sabor conference on Saturday the plan to construct a 1,000-bed center near Toowoomba is not rocket science.
