"I don't think most of the guards were unionized."
That's the problem DaveR ... you don't think.
What a waste of time this made up inquiry was ... everyone from the Premier Andrews down has "forgotten" who gave the order not to use ADF/VICpol to administer the quarantine.
Wot a freckin' joke!!!
Ahead of the final week of hearings for the quarantine hotel inquiry, where it is expected Victorian government ministers, heads of department and the premier, Daniel Andrews, will be grilled about their involvement with the bungled program, counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachel Ellyard laid out some of the potential findings the inquiry could make.
After weeks of evidence from returned travellers, security guards, police, and the public servants responsible for overseeing the quarantining of all returned travellers in Melbourne for 14 days, Ellyard said on Friday that deficiencies with the program could have been foreseen.
Victoria’s former police chief denies pushing use of private guards for hotel quarantine
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“It will be open, in our submission, to the board to find that, although the use of hotels as a setting for mass quarantine may have been unprecedented, factors that played a part in the outbreaks from the Rydges Hotel and the Stamford Plaza Hotel, were not unique to hotels as environments,” she said.
“These factors all contributed to an increased risk, which sadly, eventuated. The board may well find that these risks were foreseeable, and may have actually been foreseen, had there been an appropriate level of health focus in the program from the top down to the bottom.” Outbreaks at the two hotels have been linked to 99% of the thousands of Covid-19 cases in Victoria since late May. Ellyard said before those outbreaks inadequacies had been identified in cleaning, infection control and personal protective equipment used by staff and security contractors.
