Hotel quarantine inquiry report: Private security guards the wrong choice heraldsun.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from heraldsun.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Victoria s COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry has delivered its final report. Here are the key findings
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DecDecember 2020 at 9:15am
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Victoria s COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, led by former judge Jennifer Coate, has released its final report.
The probe was set up after more than 90 per cent of the coronavirus infections in the state s deadly second wave were linked to infection control breaches in hotel quarantine.
The inquiry held public hearings over 27 days, took evidence from 96 witnesses and received more than 350,000 pages of documents.
 Private security guards were the wrong choice to guard Victoria s returned travellers in the hotel quarantine scheme and no person or agency took responsibility for the decision to use them, an inquiry has found. Retired judge Jennifer Coate said in her final report into the $195 million program that no one took ownership for the decision to use private guards and all vigorously disputed the possibility they could have played a part in the decision . Ms Coate said police would have been a better cohort than private guards. Consideration was not given to the appropriateness or implications of using a largely casualised workforce in an environment where staff had a high likelihood of being exposed to the highly infectious COVID-19, Ms Coate said in her report on Monday.
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As expected, the Final Report of Victoria’s
Hotel Quarantine Inquiry has failed to identify who was responsible for making the decision to contract-out enforcement to untrained private security.
Below are key extracts from the Executive Summary:
Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Program ran for three months from 29 March–30 June 2020. In this time, a total of 21,821 returned travellers went through the Program, with a total of 236 (1.1 per cent) of those returned travellers testing positive for COVID-19 while in quarantine.
Despite the relatively low number of positive COVID-19 cases in the Hotel Quarantine Program, breaches of containment in the Program, in May and June 2020, were inextricably linked to the second wave of COVID-19 cases in Victoria, with devastating social and economic consequences for the State…
This is the latest ride on the merry-go-round of legal shit-fuckery that penalises community groups who dare to face off in opposition to the rape and pillage of the environment. Less than a decade ago, voluntary community organisations were able to apply for Government financed grants, now no longer available, when challenging the likes of Councils, big-moneyed developers, international consortiums and Government agencies in respect of environmental concerns. In almost all but the most frivolous of cases, legal costs were never awarded against community groups but left to lie where they may. This was in the interests of justice being seen to be done in both quasi and full legal proceedings that were being tested by those who were committed to upholding the incrementally unfolding joke of ‘A Clean Green New Zealand’ by their works and deeds. Up and down the country, these communities of voluntary environmental workers and supporters of the notion that we are only caretakers of t