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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-06-08 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

COVID-19 Quarantine Facilities

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:26): When we look across Australia, we see state government after state government taking action in addressing the risks of medi-hotels and hotel quarantine, but not here in South Australia. We have seen the Western Australian Premier come out strongly, calling on the commonwealth to establish dedicated facilities. We have seen Queensland put forward a proposal to establish a dedicated facility at Toowoomba airport. We have seen Victoria put forward a proposal, which has now received support from the commonwealth government, to establish a facility at Avalon Airport.

Now we have seen the New South Wales Treasurer say that they would welcome a dedicated facility in New South Wales as well, yet here in South Australia our Premier is the chief defender of medi-hotels as a situation going on seemingly in perpetuity and no work is being undertaken in regard to establishing permanent facilities in this state.

On this side of the house, we have been advocating for the need to get out of medi-hotels and to establish permanent facilities since we had the Peppers hotel outbreak in November last year. When we made that suggestion constructively—this was on the back of significant bipartisanship that we have had through the pandemic—the Premier's response was completely out of control. He said that this made no sense whatsoever. He said that he finds it disgusting. He said that it is an attempt at pushing fear and division. He said that it undermines public health experts. That is the Premier's view on dedicated quarantine facilities, yet we see movement across the rest of Australia towards establishing quarantine facilities.

We know SA Health and SA Police are doing the best they possibly can with what they have in terms of medi-hotels, but we know that they are inherently risky. We have seen two significant outbreaks of the virus here in South Australia. Only in the last few days, we saw that an entire floor had to be evacuated and quarantine had to recommence for that entire floor of people because of another scare. We have seen 21 separate breaches of medi-hotel quarantine in relation to the virus across Australia, but how many have we seen in the dedicated facility in the Northern Territory? Not one—absolutely zero in that dedicated facility in Howard Springs.

We are now 16 months into this pandemic. Why are we not taking action to establish dedicated facilities here? This is what is being called for by the national health experts, by epidemiologists, by the Australian Medical Association. We are hearing it around the country from different premiers, from different ministers, from different chief health officers, yet here we are seeing no action. In fact, the Premier said today that he has no advice on this. He said that there is basically no difference between hotels. He has no awareness of why having a different facility would be any safer, despite all the evidence absolutely to the contrary.

What we have seen in the last few minutes is that the spin doctors on level 15 of the State Admin Centre, the geniuses up there, have taken to Twitter to put out absolute lies on their SA Liberal media account, disgraceful lies, saying, '@alpsa suggest significant expansion of the number of international arrivals through SA quarantine'. That is a shameful lie. That is an absolute disgrace. No reading of what we have said over the past six or seven months could be interpreted like that. At every point we have been raising the risks of medi-hotels.

Even though SA Health and SA Police are doing the best they can, they are working with a tool that is not up to the job. We want to get out of medi-hotels. We do not want to have continual risks to our economy or to our community from outbreaks in the Adelaide CBD anymore. We have seen the impact of the latest outbreak at the Playford Hotel, which has now led to a state of 6½ million people being in lockdown. We do not want that to happen again here or anywhere else across the country.

It is time for the Premier to show a bit of leadership, to show a bit of backbone, and go to that national cabinet and say, 'We want a dedicated facility here. We want to get out of medi-hotels. We want to move to a dedicated facility. We don't want to have this risk for the people of South Australia, our economy or our community any longer.' It is time for this Premier to show some leadership at last.

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