The Victorian Government has refused to apologise to the residents locked inside Melbourne s public housing towers amid a growing coronavirus outbreak, despite the Ombudsman deeming the hard lockdown as unlawful.
The investigation, led by Ombudsman Deborah Glass into the treatment of public housing residents in North Melbourne and Flemington, found the immediacy of the lockdown on July 4 was not based on direct health advice and breached human rights.
However, she found a temporary lockdown to contain the growing coronavirus outbreak was warranted.
A lone woman is seen looking out the window of her apartment at the North Melbourne public housing flats.(Getty)
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image captionResidents were barred from leaving their homes for days in July
A rushed lockdown of nine tower blocks in Melbourne, Australia, due to an outbreak of coronavirus breached human rights laws, an ombudsman has found.
About 3,000 people were confined - under police guard - to their public housing units from 4 July for up to two weeks, after a state government order.
The residents were given no notice, meaning many people were left without food or medicine, the ombudsman found.
The Victorian government denies that the detention broke human rights laws.
The Victorian Ombudsman - who has no legal power but is the official investigator into government complaints - called on the government to apologise to residents for the harm and distress caused by the immediacy of their lockdown .
Time to tell the truth about 2020
As the year draws to a close, Australians should stop indulging in forgetting and myth-making about how the nation responded to the crisis of COVID-19.
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In his book
The Fear and the Freedom – Why the Second World War Still Matters, the historian Keith Lowe writes about how the nations and individuals who survived through war coped with the emotional consequences of their trauma.
They did two things. First, they tried to forget what had happened. Then, what they couldn’t forget they created myths about. The myths and stories they told themselves might have an element of truth, but they were just as likely to be a consequence of individuals wishing for something to have occurred, when in fact it didn’t.
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Sky News host Paul Murray says reports are starting to emerge about what went wrong regarding the decisions that were made by Chairman Dan and many of the bureaucracy who remain completely unhurt by this pandemic.
On Thursday, Victoria s Ombudsman has found Melbourne s public housing lockdown was in breach of human rights laws.
The Ombudsman has recommended the state government apologise to tower residents acknowledging the impact the lockdown had on their health and wellbeing.
“Many of these people came from war torn and deeply troubled backgrounds, there are many refugees are living in those towers, people who came from war torn states, where they had been tortured at the hands of their states,” Ombudsman Deborah Glass said.