Questions over hotel quarantine as calls made for national protocols
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Toowoomba’s Wagner family have a reputation for getting things done. It took their company just 19 months to build the town’s Wellcamp airport, which since opening in 2014 has evolved into a busy freight hub for flights to and from Asia.
Now, against the backdrop of rising alarm about vulnerabilities in city-based quarantine hotels, they’ve set their sights on constructing a 1000-bed quarantine facility (with potential to expand further) on land they own nearby.
Wagner Corporation chair John Wagner says the idea is “a classic case of common sense” and is kicking himself he didn’t think of it in March last year. He claims he’s been inundated with emails from stranded Australians abroad begging him to try and get the project underway.
Five big lessons that Australia learnt in 2020
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Opinion
December 18, 2020 9.10pm
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The first of the five main lessons we’ve learnt from 2020 is that Australia is a highly capable country. On the whole, it dealt with the pandemic as well or better than any country on the planet.
The effective mobilisation to confront COVID-19 exposes a very hard fact about the nation’s many persistent problems – it turns out that most long-running problems are not problems of necessity but problems of choice. One quick example. We saw homelessness just about eliminated overnight.