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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #1:

“It’s the bungle blamed for causing Victoria’s second wave”

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“Explosive allegations about Victoria’s disastrous hotel quarantine program.”

RUBY:

Victoria’s second wave has been attributed to an outbreak of Covid-19 among private contractors working in hotel quarantine.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #2:

“50 cases can be traced back to the quarantine hotels where security staff broke the rules.”

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #2:

“It may even be that every case of COVID 19 in Victoria in recent weeks could be sourced to the hotel quarantine program.”

RUBY:

Now - four months later, new government documents reveal more contractors at quarantine hotels have tested positive for the virus.

Today, Osman Faruqi on Melbourne’s ‘hot hotels’ and the risks they might still pose.

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RUBY:

Os, what happened after that first system of hotel quarantine broke down in Victoria?

OSMAN:

So at the end of June, international flights into Melbourne were suspended. That suspension was originally supposed to just last for two weeks, but it's since been extended and it's still in place. There's currently no international arrivals coming into Melbourne.

RUBY:

Osman Faruqi wrote about hotel quarantine for The Saturday Paper.

OSMAN:

That was a result of this breakdown in Melbourne's hotel quarantine system. The idea was to freeze arrivals coming into the city so the system could kind of reset. And even though there are no hotels being used for international arrivals because there are no international arrivals, there are still a couple of hotels operating as quarantine hotels, and they're referred to as health hotels or hot hotels.

RUBY:

Mm okay, so tell me more about these hot hotels. Where are they and who is in them?

OSMAN:

Well, up until a couple of weeks ago, there were two of them. The Brady Hotel and The Hotel Grand Chancellor, both in the middle of Melbourne in the CBD. The grand chancellor actually finished up its involvement in the program on September the 14th.

And those hotels are used by people who've tested positive to Covid-19 and some of their close contacts, and they're people who can't isolate safely at home because they might be at risk of transferring the virus to others.

RUBY:

Right. So every single person who's staying in one of these hotels at the moment has Coronavirus?

OSMAN:

Well, there are a few close contacts who might not have tested positive that are also allowed into the hotels. So you think of someone like a single parent who contracted the virus and they need to quarantine with their kid.

But overwhelmingly, the people in those hotels are Covid positive. And in fact, the only place that would have a higher proportion of Covid-19 positive cases would be an actual Covid ward in a hospital.

RUBY:

Okay, so tell me about how they're being run then. Are they following kind of hospital style protocols with hospital staff?

OSMAN:

Yeah. When the Premier, Daniel Andrews, was asked about the operation of these hotels...

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“They’re advertising casual…”

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“They’re hot hotels, as they're known. So essentially hospitals, they are, really.”

OSMAN:

...That's exactly how he described them. He said that these were essentially being run as a campus of a hospital.

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“They are essentially hospitals. They are campuses of that health setting, so…”

OSMAN:

And the actual program itself is being overseen by the state government. But they've contracted the running of it to the Alfred Hospital.

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“...Not only looking after those people who need looking after but protecting all of us by doing nothing that would add to the amount of cases in the broader Victorian community.”

OSMAN:

The Alfred, in turn, has subcontracted a decent chunk of that work to the logistics company Spotless, which is a company they've had a long term relationship with who do cleaning and security work at the hospital.

Spotless, in terms of their contract at these hotels, they're doing things like escorting the guests for fresh air breaks. They're delivering parcels and food to rooms. They're checking in the guests. They're taking part in health screening, they're even providing support for Covid-19 swabbing. So it's a significant chunk of work that they're doing. And they're not staff employed by the Alfred Hospital, their staff being subcontracted by Spotless.

RUBY:

Okay, so the Victorian government has passed on responsibility to the Alfred Hospital, who has in turn subcontracted some of that work to this company Spotless. How is all of that working in a practical sense? Is it holding up?

OSMAN:

Well, we actually don't really know that much about the running of these hot hotels.

But I got my hands on government documents that show that there have actually been 12 incident reports at these hot hotels. And there are reports that show that staff who work at these hotels have tested positive for Coronavirus since the start of August.

And we don't know exactly how many staff in total may have Covid-19. But we do know that some of the staff are Spotless subcontractors working for the Alfred Hospital at these two hotels.

RUBY:

Right, so is the same thing that happened the first time around happening again? Contractors who work at quarantine hotels testing positive for coronavirus?

OSMAN:

Yeah, I mean, at a top level, that seems to be the case.

We've got subcontracted staff without a health background working in high risk settings who've tested positive to Covid-19.

One intensive care nurse who works on a Covid ward told me that she was actually speechless when she heard that subcontractors were being used in hotel quarantine again.

And it's all the more striking because we're getting this information against the backdrop of the hotel quarantine inquiry, examining that first hotel quarantine setup, which is hearing how badly mismanaged the first program was and how keen everyone seemed to be to make sure these mistakes never happened again.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Os, you have documents that show that there have been positive cases of Covid-19 among workers at the Melbourne hotels that are being used to quarantine people with Coronavirus. This comes as the inquiry into the original system of hotel quarantine is showing us what went wrong the first time around. So let's talk about what that inquiry has heard.

OSMAN:

I think the clearest takeaway from the inquiry so far is that we've seen ministers and the senior bureaucrats involved in the operation of this just show total confusion.

No one here has stepped up to say that ‘I was the person responsible for infection control at the hotel site’, or ‘I was the person responsible for the controversial now decision to use private security guards’.

Just last week, the jobs minister said it wasn't him.

Archival Tape -- Martin Pakula:

“My department, whose role was to assist the control agency which was in this case DHHS.”

OSMAN:

The health minister said it wasn't her.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“Do I understand your position to be that you were not involved in the decision to engage private security?”

Archival Tape -- Jenny Mikakos:

“Not at all.”

OSMAN:

The police minister said it wasn't her either.

Archival Tape -- Lisa Neville:

“I had discovered this via the Herald Sun…”

OSMAN:

And all the bureaucrats we've heard the head of the Department of Health and Human Services

Archival Tape -- Kym Peake:

“So the hotel security, cleaning, food and the helpline were the responsibility of the Department of Jobs precincts and regions…”

OSMAN:

None of them have said that it was their decisions either.

Archival Tape -- Kym Peake:

“I know that it would be more straightforward if there were an ability today to say there is a single point of accountability for everything to do with Covid-19…”

OSMAN:

And it's really an extraordinary merry go round of responsibility and blame shifting.

RUBY:

Okay. Can you tell me more specifically about why private contractors were used and the problems with that?

OSMAN:

Yeah, the inquiry's heard a lot of evidence that that points to the fact that the workforce used to provide security services at these hotels was very heavily casualised and the chain of command was super opaque.

So, you know, the companies that would be bringing on the security guards would sometimes further outsource the hiring of those to even smaller companies.

And a lot of the staff who fulfilled those jobs came from low income, migrant backgrounds.
And during this period of the pandemic, they were really desperate for work and they might have been working multiple jobs at the same time, which increases the risk of transmission. And a lot of these workers also lived in really high dense areas where there was a further risk of transmission.

And I guess the final bit of evidence that sort of pieces this all this together that the inquiry's heard is that because of how precariously employed a lot of these workers were due to things like being on visa restrictions that limited the amount of hours they were officially allowed to work, they were really reluctant to be upfront with contact traces about all the shifts they were doing and all the jobs they had.

So the virus might have been spreading, but these workers were feeling pressured or scared by the government and didn't want to be totally upfront.

RUBY:

And are there any similarities between the situations of those workers and those that are in the current hot hotel system that you're reporting on?

OSMAN:

The recruitment process seems to be pretty similar. You know, while ads that were placed by a spotless looking for staff to work on the hot hotels said that experience in a health care setting was advantageous, that wasn't actually a requirement.

And the workforce working on these sites was built up very, very quickly. Spotless themselves said that when they put out ads looking for people to work in these hotels, they received over 600 applications in just three hours. So it's a workforce that as a result has been built and patched together super quickly, drawn from a pool of people who might not have the experience to work in such a high risk setting, like a Covid-19 positive hot hotel.

RUBY:

And so this inquiry is focused on the problems in the first hotel quarantine system. But have there been any questions directly about this hot hotel system?

OSMAN:

Yeah, the chief health officer, Brett Sutton, actually did answer some questions about the idea of hot hotels. And Sutton himself wasn't consulted about the decision to either establish the first quarantine program, or this latest version of it. But he was still asked about the concept of a hot hotel.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“You say in your statement at paragraph 152 that the idea of a Covid positive, or hot hotel, clearly represented a risk of transmission from the quarantined individuals to contracted staff.”

Archival Tape -- Brett Sutton:

“Yes.”

OSMAN:

And when Sutton was asked whether it would have been better practice to keep patients who were Covid-19 positive in an actual infectious diseases ward in a hospital rather than in a hotel ward, he said yes.

Archival Tape -- Brett Sutton:

“It's clear that a clinical setting provides a higher level of clinical care and infection prevention control than might occur outside of that setting. That’s uncontroversial”

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“Thank you, professor…”

RUBY:

Os, given all of this and the knowledge that we have about the risks of subcontracting out workers in hotel quarantine, why did this happen a second time?

OSMAN:

You know, I think this new hot hotel program was established quite quickly and the goal was for it to be more clinically supervised and much more of a health care setting. That's why the Alfred Hotel was brought in. But you can see by the decision to use spotless staff that there is still this reliance throughout the public sector on a privatized workforce.

And this outsourcing is a pattern we've seen a number of times in this pandemic. You know, the Victorian government has one of the lowest funded public health teams within the State Department, and it needed to outsource so much of its contact tracing effort to bring it up to scratch. And it seems like when it came to hotel quarantine, the same thing happened the first time around. And the lack of any kind of dedicated public sector workforce to manage this is probably why the Alfreds had to rely on Spotless.

And it's not something that has a quick fix, unfortunately. You know, it's really easy to cut back on the public sector. It's much harder to build up a public sector, particularly a healthcare workforce that is experienced, that has knowledge and has tried and tested. But if there's one clear takeaway from this pandemic and particularly the experiences we've seen in Victoria, it's that we do need a well-trained, well resourced public healthcare system to manage the tail of this pandemic and any future issues we might have to deal with.

RUBY:

Os, thank you so much for talking to me about this today.

OSMAN:

Thanks heaps, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Melbourne’s curfew will be lifted from today, after Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced a slight easing of restrictions over the weekend.

Primary school students will return to class from October and gatherings of up to five, from two households, will be allowed.

The next step out of lockdown will take place a week earlier than scheduled, on October 19.

And tributes have poured in for former Senator Susan Ryan who passed away yesterday.

Ryan was the architect of the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act and was the first woman to serve in a federal Labor cabinet.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard described Ryan as a “feminist hero”.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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