Reading the business press last week, apparently there are early stage conversations going on between the Wagner family - who built and own the Toowoomba-Wellcamp airport - to construct a purpose built, 1300 bed quarantine facility on the airfield land. International flights would land directly at the Toowoomba-Wellcamp airport and arriving passengers would go straight into the facility. He described a facility that resembles Howard Springs in Darwin, but directly on the airport grounds. He says he could have it built and running within 4 months of getting the go ahead.
More importantly, while 1000 beds would be for quarantining arrivals. 300 beds would be for staff, who I assume would work several week stints, staying there, not mixing with the general community between shifts (a bit like fly in fly out mining workers). Going some way to alleviating the major chink in the armour of hotel quarantine that keeps coming up over and over again.
Sure the Wagners are talking their own book and are not doing this purely out of the goodness of their heart. They see a profitable business opportunity. But why has it taken so long for someone to come up with a concrete plan of this type? The Federal government owns heaps of land around the vast majority of our airports. I said on here months ago (as did others) that this exact model should have been instituted across half a dozen of our airports. The Federal Government owns plenty of land to do it.
But I think it goes back to what I said earlier. All eggs were seemingly were put in the vaccine basket. There is this perception among the politicians and the public, that the vaccine is a silver bullet, fix all solution. And as soon as that magic wand is waved, everything goes back to normal. Which clearly will not be the case. Hence why perhaps there haven't been moves for longer term management solutions and facilities. And we've bumbled along with the hotel quarantine temporary band aid. When the elephant in the room is that we likely need a longer term (perhaps years long) management solution with purpose built facilities.
www.abc.net.au
