By Elishya Perera
SYDNEY, Australia (CWBN)_ After months of hearings from more than 60 witnesses, the final report on Victoria’s COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry has been released.
From a peak of more than 500 infections in March this year, the active cases in the Victorian community fell to 57, a couple of months later. However, the wake of breaches of containment in the Hotel Quarantine Program operating in Victoria led to a second wave of the virus in the state, which resulted in 800 fatalities and more than 18,000 new infections.
Since scientific evidence inextricably linked this second wave to infections stemming from returned travellers who were subjected to the to the Hotel Quarantine Programme in Victoria, an inquiry was established in July this year.
The final report of the inquiry, which was tabled in Parliament on Monday (Dec 21), determined that a single individual was not responsible for the fatal decision to use private security guards in the programme. Instead, Jennifer Coate, the chairperson of the Board of Inquiry, noted that there were “people with influence” who contributed to the decision.
Prior to a state control meeting held on March 27, the day before the Quarantine Programme began, then-police chief commissioner Graham Ashton “expressed preference” that private security would be used, while the state police would provide backup, and this position of the chief commissioner was “clearly persuasive” to others present at the meeting.
The report also pointed out that while Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel were most likely available to assist the programme, however, it could not be determined if their presence would have removed the need for private security guards. “[…] if the ADF was available it would have only been available in numbers to supplement, rather than replace, the existing security workforce,” Coate wrote.
One of the noteworthy conclusions of the inquiry was that the decision to recruit private security was not made at a ministerial level, which effectively clears Premier Daniel Andrews, former health minister Jenny Mikakos and ministers Lisa Neville and Martin Pakula.
While, the Victorian Premier had committed to adopting the hotel quarantine programme, however, “neither he nor his ministers had any active role in, or oversight of, the decision about how that enforcement would be achieved,” the report read.
Nevertheless, the inquiry concluded that the decision to use security guards was “ill-defined from the beginning” and found that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to take responsibility for its role as the primary institution assigned to run the Programme.
While Mikakos and two senior public servants have already resigned over the breaches, the Premier apologised on Monday for the “very clear errors”, made in the programme.
“If I could turn back the clock and receive daily reports on what happens in hotel quarantine as I do now, then, of course, I would,” Andrews said.
The Premier added that his commitment is not only to apologise but also to ensure that the government accepts all recommendations made in the report. “My commitment is to not only apologise – apologies are very important, particularly when you mean it – but to also offer my commitment to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to learn these lessons,” he said.
