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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-06-08 Daily Xml
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COVID-19 Quarantine Facilities

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:32): My question is to the Premier. Has anyone anywhere within the South Australian government given any thought, held any discussions, done any preliminary work or analysis on a dedicated quarantine facility for returning Australians here in South Australia?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:32): Well, not that I am aware of. The reality is we have done work obviously on dedicated quarantine facilities for the Pacific program, and that's based currently at Paringa. We have done work out at Parafield, and in terms of the repatriation of Australian citizens, we have worked very hard.

The Leader of the Opposition might recall the extraordinary work put in by SA Health after the Parafield cluster, which really looked at the issue of how we make the facility for those who have contracted the coronavirus to be in the most secure facility possible. We have limited very significantly the number of times that the door is open every day. We have made sure that the people who are working in that Tom's Court facility are SA police officers or SA protective services officers and of course SA health workers themselves.

Tom's Court Hotel is ideally set up to minimise airflow out into the corridor. It's been retrospectively fitted with CCTV so that we can monitor every single time that door is open. In fact, the environment was chosen because it could accommodate people making their own meals in the room so that, again, that would massively minimise the number of times that door is ever open.

We have looked at every single possible opportunity for a transmission of that disease within our hotel and then tried to do everything we can to mitigate it, but we can't be complacent. We are dealing with a very, very sneaky disease, as Nicola Spurrier refers to it. It's highly transmissible. It can't be taken lightly.

Currently in the world we have between 10,000 and 15,000 people losing their lives every single day and, although we are enjoying at the moment very low-level restrictions here in South Australia, we can't be complacent. Other parts of the world, where I was reliably informed by many so-called self-appointed experts that they had the right approach to dealing with the coronavirus—well, look at their performance now. We can never become complacent with this disease and that's why we have to work as quickly as we can to vaccinate everybody who becomes eligible.

We have to make sure that we are abiding by the restrictions that are put in place in terms of limiting people coming from overseas and from other high-risk areas in Australia. We have to use that QR code when we are out in public so that our Communicable Disease Control Branch has access to information and data as quickly as possible. By doing all these things, we put ourselves in an enviable position.

I know that these restrictions are tough and I want to thank the people of South Australia because it's these individual sacrifices, these collective sacrifices, that are being made that have kept our state safe and our economy strong. When I look at those statistics and I see that we now have more people employed in South Australia than any time before in the history of South Australia, then every South Australian should feel very proud because they have played a part in providing that outcome.

It's not to say that some people haven't been disproportionately affected but, in total, we have more people employed and more wages paid now than before COVID, and there are very few other places in the world that can say that. That's because we have had a good health response. We have listened to experts, we have listened to evidence and we have listened to science. We have worked with the people of South Australia and we still have a way to go with the vaccination rollout.

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