COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:24): My question is to the Premier. Does the Premier acknowledge that medi-hotels are not fit for the purpose of quarantine, particularly regarding COVID-19?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:24): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question and his interest in medi-hotels. I think Australia has now received more than or certainly around 300,000 people through our quarantine arrangements during the life of this coronavirus pandemic. There have been approximately 20 transmissions within that environment.

I think Australia's performance is the best in the world. I think that we are constantly learning more and more about this insidious disease and the way it is transmitted. We are learning more and more about the variants of interest and the variants of concern and we are adapting the way in which we operate our medi-hotels in Australia.

Here in South Australia, we have a slightly different arrangement and there are different arrangements by state. If you go to Queensland, for example, and you become COVID-positive, you are put into hospital. Here, we have a dedicated quarantine facility for COVID-positive patients, the Tom's Court Hotel, which has a higher level specification than I think just about any other facility in Australia.

Of course, we created that dedicated facility in response to the situation that occurred after our review of the Parafield cluster. The point that I am making to the house today is that we are constantly learning and we are constantly adapting. What we are doing in government, of course, and we have done this since day one, is listening to the experts. We have done very well in Australia by listening to science and evidence and making informed decisions based upon what the experts advise.

We have experts in public health administration here in South Australia and we've got a very good head of that area of government, Professor Nicola Spurrier. She, along with her fellow chief health officers and chief public health officers around the country, sits on the Australian Health Protection Principle Committee (AHPPC), and they meet on a very regular basis. In fact, in the last couple of days, they have met several times per day to review that information.

They are in a very good position to make informed decisions about the types of facilities that we should be putting people into. Last year, both the national cabinet and the AHPPC commissioned some research that was done. It was referred to as the Halton report and Ms Halton and her team travelled to each state, they reviewed the quarantine hotel arrangements in each jurisdiction and provided advice to the national cabinet.

Subsequent to that, there has been very significant further improvement in the way that we manage those hotel facilities. We are listening to the experts and we are responding to the experts. As we know, we had an extraordinarily regrettable transmission in our quarantine hotel recently at the Playford Hotel and we conducted a very thorough and robust investigation. That full investigation has been made transparently clear and provided to the people of South Australia. There was no breach. There was an investigation into the potential causes of that transmission, but nobody will ever know for sure. This is a risky business. This is a highly contagious disease, but we are listening to the experts to make sure that we have the highest level of protection here in our state.