Hard lockdown angers tower block residents
Residents of the nine high-rise towers under police lockdown in Melbourne have reacted angrily to the Victorian government’s admission that some of the blocks do not contain confirmed cases of Covid-19.
The reaction came as Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday announced the closure of the Victoria-New South Wales border from midnight tonight.
The sudden move to a police-enforced ring-fencing of public housing towers in North Melbourne and Flemington attracted renewed criticism after Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton, acknowledged on Sunday that some of the towers had been locked down on the ‘‘precautionary principle’’ that transmission may have occurred between the buildings.
Australia’s acting Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, backed Victoria’s hard lockdown of the towers for a minimum of five days, comparing their threat of spreading coronavirus to ‘‘vertical cruise ships’’.
‘‘Even though they are in two postcodes . . . [the towers] are very close together, there is a lot of intermingling of the people between those towers for work, for family, for community events,’’ he said.
The hard lockdown imposed on Saturday means residents of the towers are not allowed to leave their flats for any reason.
The Age and Sydney Morning Herald spoke to several public housing residents, community leaders and advocates for those inside the towers on Sunday who expressed concerns about the fact not all towers had recorded positive cases.
Mukhtar Muhammad, who is volunteering with the Australian
Muslim Social Services Agency in North Melbourne, said the amount of help needed across all nine towers was overwhelming and people simply shouldn’t be locked down if they did not have Covid-19.
‘‘It’s literally like a prison, no backyard, nowhere to go,’’ he said. ‘‘Those people shouldn’t be subjected to that treatment, particularly if they’re not carrying the virus.’’
Victorian Police Association secretary Wayne Gatt joined critics of the tower lockdown, lashing the Andrews government for failing to prepare officers for the move. He said some officers were interrupted from regular duties and called in to police the lockdown with no notice.
He warned that risks to police could prompt a repeat of the hotel quarantine bungle, in which security guards spread coronavirus throughout Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs.
Damian Stock, chief executive of the Inner Melbourne Community Legal Centre, said that in the case of the public housing towers the government’s decision to go beyond the ‘‘stay at home’’ directions applied to 12 Melbourne postcodes seemed excessive.
‘‘If there’s no evidence of any infections in these buildings, then it would seem disproportionate that they have been subject to a hard lockdown,’’ he said.
Stock said the Health and Wellbeing Act required lawmakers to make orders in proportion to health risks.
‘‘My understanding has been with the hard lockdown that the additional extra measure and the imposition on rights and liberties is because of infection rates in buildings,’’ he said.