Quarantine angst

All eyes are on Victoria, as the state rushes to test up to 600 Australian Open players, officials and support staff after a hotel quarantine worker tested positive to coronavirus on Wednesday – the same day Victoria officially “eliminated” the virus for a second time (third time’s a charm though, right?). But a few eyes are also on Canberra, with renewed calls for a national approach to hotel quarantine, following yet another transmission between a guest and a worker. In a joint press conference, Labor’s shadow ministers for health and home affairs, Mark Butler and Kristina Keneally, called for the federal government to set up a national facility, pointing out that borders and quarantine are a Commonwealth responsibility, with the states forced to step up because the federal government hadn’t. In an earlier press conference, Prime Minister Scott Morrison seemed reluctant to consider changes to the hotel quarantine program, insisting that it remains the most effective way to bring Australians home (though he noted the $243.7 million the government had put into the remote Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory). “He doesn’t want to assume any of the risk,” Keneally observed.

In happier COVID-19 news, the prime minister announced that Australia had secured an extra 10 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, doubling our stock of doses, as well as the fact that the government will offer a vaccine free to any foreign nationals who are in the country – including refugees. Australia now has enough of the Pfizer vaccine to dose 10 million people, but concerns remain about our predominant vaccine, AstraZeneca, with former chief medical officer, now head of the health department, Brendan Murphy forced to defend it on the ABC’s 7.30 last night, saying he would be “very pleased to have it” (one wonders which vaccine government leaders are getting). Ireland today joined France, Belgium, Germany and other EU countries in recommending against using AstraZeneca on people over 65, while Switzerland has rejected it altogether. 

Inside parliament, Question Time remained dominated by questions on the government’s proposed industrial relations changes (eight by my count), broken up by Andrew Wilkie using the independents’ question to ask about increased costs on the Spirit of Tasmania service. But it was an earlier debate over Labor’s attempts to move amendments on the government’s national child abuse redress scheme that brought about the most quintessentially #auspol moment of the day, with the government voting to gag its own minister rather than explain to parliament why it opposed the changes. A close second must have been the government’s “both sides”-driven amendments to a Senate motion calling out the rise in far-right extremism, which added a reference to far-left extremism. (The Greens decided to vote against that one, though Labor reluctantly let it slide.)

Morrison, meanwhile, took two pretty big phone calls from America today ­– one with Google chief Sundar Pichai and another with US President Joe Biden, putting to rest gossip over the fact he hadn’t made contact with the latter since Biden’s inauguration. Both calls went well, according to the PM, who described them as “constructive” and “warm” respectively: Biden might come to Australia, while Google might just stay. That’s bad news for Bing, which yesterday said it would willingly participate in the news media bargaining code, but good news, no doubt, for Morrison.

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