Class action to proceed against Victoria’s hotel quarantine program
Victorian business owners who were forced to shut down during the height of the pandemic have launched a class action against the Andrews government.
The Supreme Court has ruled the action against the state government over its handling of hotel quarantine can go ahead.
Businesses are seeking damages for the state’s second lockdown which started in July 2020 after its quarantine hotels, operated by Unified Security and MSS Security, failed to contain infections.
An inquiry into the program found the quarantine system to be responsible for the deaths of 787 people and 18,000 infections due to poor health.
The inquiry accused the hotel quarantine program of being a logistics exercise rather than a proper infectious diseases control measure.
The action will be led by Quinn Emanuel partner Damian Scattini.
“When the Victorian government decided to run a mandatory hotel quarantine program, it took on a duty to ensure it was managed properly,” Scattini said.
“If the hotel quarantine program had been handled competently by the people in charge, there would not have been a second lockdown.
“That lockdown decimated businesses and, through this class action, we are giving business owners a way to get back some of what they lost.
“The class action relates to tens of thousands of businesses that provided goods or services to the public from bricks and mortar premises in Victoria and suffered financial loss because of Victoria’s second lockdown.”
A hearing in June heard damages were being sought for economic loss from stage 3 and 4 restrictions, after Covid-9 was let loose from the Rydges and Stamford Plaza hotels.
The Supreme Court heard in May 2020, a family of four detained at the Rydges infected a hotel worker and private security staff.
Staff were not wearing masks or practicing hand hygiene.
The incident led to eight further infections of workers and nine of their contacts.
Further to this, in June a returned traveller and a couple transmitted the disease to security guards at the Stamford hotel.
These infections were linked to cases in 26 workers, a nurse, and 19 household or social contacts.
“Immediately thereafter, there was an upward trend in community infections that was acknowledged as related by genomic sequencing to the failures in the quarantine hotel program earlier alleged. The second wave had begun,” court documents state.
The businesses allege that by mid-August genomic sequencing showed clustering of about 75% of community infections with the quarantine hotel infections.
The action states that “had the (State of Victoria) conducted themselves prudently to the appropriate standard, transmission at each hotel would not have occurred.”
Justice John Dixon dismissed the State’s application for a strike out.
Irit Jackson, 29th August 2022
