One week after national cabinet raised the cap on international arrivals to about 6500 per week and said the new level should last to the end of April, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews paused all international flights into Victoria from Saturday.
The Premier also aired the idea of accepting only “hundreds” in Victoria each week over the longer-term, in new arrangements he wanted to raise with state and federal leaders.
“If I were to form a view that we only want to do a small number of compassionate Aussies coming home, it wouldn’t be to save money, it wouldn’t be to avoid the hard work,” Mr Andrews said.
“I would then say to the Prime Minister: ‘You can have all my hotel quarantine workforce to roll out the vaccine’.”
He did not elaborate on how those workers might support the vaccination program.
The federal government does not accept the Victorian idea that quarantine staff need to be redeployed to the vaccine rollout, given Canberra and the states are already lining up doctors, nurses and pharmacists to do the vaccinations.
