Coronavirus, Parafield Cluster

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (16:28): My question is to the Premier. On whose advice did the Premier rely before he made comments on 20 November regarding the case of the man who worked at the Woodville Pizza Bar?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (16:28): We have a briefing, and there were many people who were present at that meeting. It was made abundantly clear to me that false and misleading information had been provided to public health officials in South Australia. This is a very serious issue because public health officials rely on information to inform any response they have to a public health emergency.

In this case, that information that was reported to me was very clearly false and misleading. This information that was provided to public health was both false and misleading. I note that the person has now apologised for this, and it is now the subject of police investigation. There has been some scrutiny with regard to this issue and, in particular, whether or not I should have made this comment. I make the point that this is very different from the way it has been characterised by some people.

We don't routinely pass on information provided during an investigation by a public health official to other agencies of government. What we do, though, is expect that all information which is provided to public health officials be truthful and fulsome so that we can frame our response. In this case, it wasn't truthful and it wasn't fulsome. The evidence that had been provided was that this person had casually attended the Woodville Pizza Bar and purchased a pizza, not that they were working as a casual employee.

This was a very material piece of information. I think the police commissioner himself described it as the straw that broke the camel's back, and in fact it was one of the crucial pieces of information that we relied upon in deciding to proceed with that six-day pause or circuit-breaker in South Australia. Ultimately, when we became aware of that piece of information being false and misleading, it caused us to reconsider the magnitude of the cluster in South Australia, and we therefore adjusted that back to a three-day pause or circuit-breaker.

This was still a very important pause or circuit-breaker because, as you would recall, sir, in the early days of this cluster there was a very fast-moving infection in South Australia. We had gone from one infection reported on the Saturday night to three infections on the Sunday afternoon, I think it was. It then escalated to 17 on the Monday morning, so this was moving very quickly and we needed to get as many people as we could into that 14 days of quarantine in a very short period of time.

It was really important that we didn't have people who weren't in that net, that quarantine arrangement, out continuing to infect people so that that task for our public health administrators in South Australia became larger and larger and larger, so a decision was made to have that pause, have that circuit-breaker. That was shortened because of the great speed of our contact tracing and also that diminished scope.

We were also very fortunate in the work we did that we had the support of the commonwealth, Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. We were all working together to do everything we could to put that net across this issue as quickly as possible and put people into quarantine to stop the spread of this very dangerous infection.