AMA WA President Andrew Miller slams McGowan Government's handling of hotel quarantine

The WA President of the Australian Medical Association has slammed the McGowan Government’s handling of hotel quarantine in the wake of the COVID breach that has locked down Perth, Peel and the South West for five days, saying mining companies could do a better job.

“Mining companies run at a very high standard compared to the rest of the community in terms of monitoring their workforces,” Dr Andrew Miller told The West Live today.

“In fact, I would be a bit provocative and say if the mining companies had been running the quarantine we might not be in this situation … (because) the fly-in, fly-outs certainly undertake their own testing regime and it’s very disappointing we weren’t having that level of testing being done in hotel quarantine.”

In an opinion piece in The West Australian today, Dr Miller described WA’s approach to hotel quarantine as “amateur”, and told The West Live the McGowan Government had failed to learn the lessons from hotel quarantine breaches that sparked previous COVID outbreaks in Victoria, South Australia and Brisbane.

Victoria instituted daily saliva testing of quarantine hotel workers following the outbreak that closed down the State last year, yet WA only introduced this policy last Friday.

Listen to The West Live from 8.45am

And the security guard at the centre of the WA breach was also working as a ride-shire driver, whereas Victoria prohibited quarantine hotel workers from having other jobs where they were face-to-face with the public.

“I think the Government here has been doing its homework in the car on the way to school,” Dr Miller said.

“We’re still not getting QR codes mandatory on the Safe WA app for another couple of weeks at many busy places in our community… the quarantine is not a proper quarantine system because you’re still combining it with hotels, you’ve been slow at getting sewerage testing done… and all these other things, and now we’re paying the price for it.”

Dr Miller also said repeated attempts by the AMA WA to have the Premier meet with frontline health professionals and specialists in disease transmission in the workplace had so far been unsuccessful.

Hear the whole interview on The West Live at 8.45am.