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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-12-01 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus, Hotel Quarantine

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (16:12): My question is to the Premier. Has the Premier now released a copy of the confidential appendix to the Halton national review of hotel quarantine to his health minister, as his health minister said in estimates he was unable to access it?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (16:12): I refer the member to my previous answer. The author of that report did provide comprehensive feedback to South Australia and to other jurisdictions as part of the debrief to that. So I think that we have a very clear picture, from that Halton review, of how we were tracking against the various elements of that review.

I think, in total, there were six general areas of interest for that review. Under those headings, they had multiple different areas which were evaluated across different jurisdictions, and feedback was provided. I again just repeat to the house what I have said previously: we did extraordinarily well in terms of that evaluation, but that doesn't mean to say there isn't further work to do.

You would note in recent weeks that we have made some changes to the way we go about managing our medi-hotels in South Australia. The first of those of course was the issue that we would move to mandatory seven-day testing. This wasn't previously favoured by the AHPPC for the reasons that I have outlined to this house previously. Nevertheless, due to the particular infection that we had in South Australia and the genomics of that case, which came in on 2 November, we decided to adjust that protocol and move away from mandatory daily declarations of people's wellness to serve on that shift to having that augmented with a mandatory seven-day test.

We have also now released our eight-point plan, in terms of managing our medi-hotels going forward. We note that the Victorian government, in addition to receiving the Halton review, has received the interim Coate investigation report and, before the final report has been accepted, they have already announced that they will be making changes to the way that they run medi-hotels in Victoria.

Dr Chris McGowan, the Chief Executive of the Department for Health and Wellbeing, has now written to the AHPPC asking them to further clarify various issues with regard to managing medi-hotels going forward, particularly in light of some of the changes that we have made in South Australia and the Coate investigation report received in Victoria.

In addition to that, we have placed on the agenda for the next national cabinet meeting the issue of whether there should be pre-flight testing put in place. This is something that has not only been referred to the national cabinet, but it has also been raised at the AHPPC. So we will await any recommendations that the AHPPC makes to the national cabinet with regard to pre-flight testing, and also any changes to the way that we manage medi-hotels in Australia.

We do believe that, whilst we have the right to manage our medi-hotels in any way, shape or form that we choose here in South Australia, there are advantages in sharing information, there are advantages in operating in a national approach, and so we have referred our eight-point plan to the AHPPC, and we await any response from them. What I would say, though, is that we in South Australia remain 100 per cent committed to the national repatriation of Australian citizens, and that means that we do need to have hotel quarantine arrangements in Australia.

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