The glaring oversight in Premier’s assessments of $223m Wellcamp failure
By Zach Hope
In combative tones on Friday, Annastacia Palaszczuk attempted to spin the loss of more than $200 million on a barely used quarantine hub into a story of strong leadership and federal government failures.
Though she had apparently not yet read the full auditor-general’s financial audit of the Wellcamp quarantine deal, the premier told reporters it had found “the procurement process taken was reasonable and the government’s commitment to public value was maintained”.
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was defiant in the face of an auditor-general report criticising elements of her government’s deal for the barely-used Wellcamp quarantine hub.
In addition, she said paying Toowoomba’s Wagner Corporation to build the 1000-bed hub was “the right decision at the right time” because the world was dealing with an unpredictable COVID-19 pandemic.
But these assessments from the premier, both of the report and the Australian context at the time, are dubious at best.
Rather than exonerate the Queensland government after more than two years of persistent criticisms and questions, Brendan Worrall’s long-awaited and detailed investigation was highly critical in key sections.
Yes, the procurement process may have been “reasonable”. But it was also unnecessarily secretive, he found. For about a year, the government dodged questions about costs to taxpayers under the all-too familiar guise of “commercial in confidence”.
But disclosing the total price, as opposed to more sensitive granular detail, was “unlikely to place the supplier at a substantial commercial disadvantage,” he said.
Crucially, the report also found the government had assessed Wellcamp’s value-for-money proposition, but did not “fully” think through what the state’s rapidly increasing vaccination rates would reasonably mean for its ongoing viability as a quarantine hub.
The failings on this front are damning when you consider Queensland’s double-vaccination rates were already about 50 per cent when the Palaszczuk government signed the contracts with Wagner Corporation in late September 2021.
Under the “National Plan”, which was endorsed by National Cabinet only the previous month, states were supposed to begin reducing quarantine requirements for returning vaccinated Australians at 70 per cent.
In line with forecasts, Queensland hit this double-dose milestone in October – the month after going-it-alone on Wellcamp – and reached 80 per cent by November. The same month, sniffing the breeze and smelling a looming white elephant, the Queensland government then secretly investigated the costs of tearing up the Wellcamp contract. It found “no material net benefit” and pressed on.
When Wellcamp opened in early 2022, Australia was about to enter the final phase of the National Plan: business as usual. As it turned out, and not unexpectedly, Wellcamp closed months later a pit of money and political capital.
The only winner from the saga was the Wagner Corporation, which took back the keys this year after the government’s lease expired. The organisation now has a barely used accommodation centre, paid for by taxpayers, that it can charge out for agricultural workers, government workers and, in time, guests for a mooted entertainment precinct.
Palaszczuk on Friday made the eminently fair point that the pandemic was a capricious beast of evolving variants. No one knew what was percolating on the other side of the world. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, could we reflect on the good fortune that a more serious threat never materialised.
But it was also true the federal Coalition government of the day, led by Scott Morrison, had already announced it intended to build its own quarantine facilities drawing on money from its own treasury.
Only six weeks before inking the Wellcamp deal, Queensland had signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on a new Centre of National Resilience at a site in Pinkenba, in Brisbane’s industrial zone.
Unlike Wellcamp on the outskirts of Toowoomba, the site was government-owned and close to Brisbane’s international airport and several major hospitals.
No other state slated for a quarantine centre from the Australian government felt it was necessary or prudent to build its own.
However, Palaszczuk at this time was enjoying political mileage from her conservative approach to pandemic management and at-times outright hostility to Morrison. Libs be damned, Queensland was on its own path. The result? A $223 million facility used by only 730 guests.
In the face of reasonable questions on Friday, Palaszczuk deflected and fought, at one point criticising a journalist for, in her curious assessment, siding with NSW over Queensland. There were few answers, admissions or whiffs of contrition. Queenslanders be damned, too.