The South Australian Government has lodged a plan with the federal government to let 160 international students at a time quarantine in separate quarantine facilities at Parafield Airport:
The quarantine facilities at Parafield Airport look good.
The government claims the international student arrivals would not impact the quota for returning Australians, which will continue to be housed in cramped city medi-hotels:
South Australian Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said the quarantine site at Parafield Airport would be reserved for international students because of the way it was set up.
Professor Spurrier said students were used to “unit-style” accommodation, while international arrivals were not.
“The way the units are set up is there is a kitchenette and then there are a number of bedrooms and it’s all in one detached unit, and so you couldn’t expect an international arrival to share a facility with people they don’t know because there would be a risk of catching COVID and also I think that would be considered unacceptable,” she said.
The labor opposition has attacked the move questioning why Australians would still be housed in cramped, dangerous quarantine hotels while international students enjoy better accommodation:
Opposition health spokesman Chris Picton told ABC: “It is incomprehensible that we would set up one quarantine facility just for international students and still rely on hotels — decades-old, poor ventilation — for all the other returning people coming back to Australia from very high-risk countries around the world.”
“If we can do it for international student arrivals, then surely we can get returning Australians out of hotel quarantine as well,” he added. “We have a situation where people are going into hotel quarantine without COVID–19 but are catching it inside hotel quarantine, which is totally unacceptable.”
The City of Salisbury Council has also voted unanimously to oppose the plan:
A motion put up by Deputy Mayor Chad Buchanan said the council would “publicly state its opposition and disappointment that there was no public consultation on the proposal”…
Cr Buchanan said local residents were concerned the facility would be too close to homes…
The motion also calls for the state government to focus on returning Australian citizens and permanent residents rather than international students.
My view is that the planned facility looks good. It is low density with no shared ventilation or shared corridors. This alone makes Parafield Airport a far safer quarantine facility than cramped inner-city hotels where virus has spread between guests, staff and into the community (including seeding Victoria’s current outbreak).
My concern is that it is point blank wrong to provide foreign students with more comfortable and safer quarantine facilities than provided to actual returning Australians. Moreover, any expanded capacity should be first and foremost used to bring stranded Australians home.
As usual, our governments are putting the interests of foreign nationals ahead of actual Australians.
