CORONAVIRUS — HOTEL QUARANTINE
67. Dr D.J. HONEY to the Premier:
I
have a supplementary question. Given that the safety of the WA community relies
on thousands of hotel quarantine workers doing the right thing, is the
Premier confident that we have the processes to stop those people having second
jobs or does the government need to look further into this matter?
Several members interjected.
The SPEAKER: You have asked
the supplementary. We will have the answer now. Premier.
Mr M.
McGOWAN replied:
The premise of the question, which
I will get checked, is that someone has been stood down because they breached the rules. That is the premise of the question. If
someone has been stood down because they breached the rules, that would
indicate the rules are working. I think that is just logical. In hotel
quarantine, we are dealing with thousands of people at any one point in time,
and if people breach the rules and they are uncovered, being stood down is an
obvious consequence of doing so. Hotel quarantine workers received a 40 per cent
pay increase on the basis that they do the right thing. Obviously, working in
hotel quarantine, just so members know, involves long hours. They work all
hours of the day and night. Probably at times it is quite boring. We have a range
of people who ordinarily would have a range of jobs, so they might do that and
then they might have done part-time employment in other areas. Back in January
or perhaps February, we sought to remove those opportunities for other jobs. If
the system is working, that is a good thing.
In
terms of other things that we have done, we have just implemented mandatory
vaccinations so that people working in hotel quarantine have mandatory
vaccinations. We have put in place a daily testing regime. All the people who
go into what is termed the red zone in hotel quarantine are required to be
tested every single day they are at work. There is also a testing regime when
they are on leave, but it is not every day. We have upped the requirement for
personal protective equipment. We are phasing out three hotels; they are on the
cusp of being phased out as we speak. We have done a whole range of things to
keep the system safe and secure, and we will continue to do so. But, as I have
said repeatedly, the system itself is not perfect; it was never designed for
these purposes. We have had 45 000 returning Australians come through it. Of
course, there needs to be much more careful analysis by the commonwealth of
people leaving the country, wherever they may be going, so that we do not have
people leaving the country and then joining the list and displacing people
overseas who might have been trying to get on the list. A range of changes
could be made at a federal level, but as members can tell what from I have
said, at a state level, huge improvements have been put in place.