West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has revealed plans to force people in hotel quarantine to wear monitoring ankle bracelets in a move to beef up security.
Two days after news broke that two women who had travelled from South Australia on a plane without having an exemption to enter WA allegedly escaped from their quarantine hotel in Perth’s CBD, Mr McGowan said he wanted to force people who presented a flight risk or had a criminal history to wear the bracelets.
Premier Mark McGowan said he would force some people in hotel quarantine to wear a monitoring bracelet.
“If we identify people who are potential flight risks or who might have a criminal history, we are looking at applying monitoring bracelets to them,” he said.
“So what that means is if someone is identified as a risk, we have the legal power now to put an ankle bracelet on, that’s what police will look to do.”
Mr McGowan also flagged the establishment of a dedicated hotel with beefed-up security.
“We may well have one hotel that has the people who are identified as a flight risk or danger, that they are specially kept in during their period of quarantine, and there may well be beefed-up security in this specific hotel,” he said.
Mr McGowan has also sent a letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison asking for 140 defence force personnel to help manage the 24-hour security of hotel quarantine in WA.
“We have 240 security staff dealing with hotel quarantine. We had about 11,000 people go through hotel quarantine over the course of the last six months or so, we’ve had a handful of incidents and we had no community spread of the virus for 131 days,” he said.
“But any assistance we can receive to help us manage the hotels 24 hours a day would be welcome.”
The news of the women allegedly fleeing hotel quarantine to a party in Perth’s southern suburbs comes just days after another man fronted a Perth court accused of leaving hotel quarantine several times to visit his girlfriend.
A Perth court heard on Tuesday the two Adelaide women managed to evade security and escape from the Novotel Hotel to attend a party with a local rapper, and allegedly giggled and hung up when police phoned them.
In another move to ramp up security in WA, Mr McGowan also flagged with national cabinet the idea of tracking of people flying between states. He said the fact it was unknown who boarded interstate flights within Australia had been a concern for police "for years".
"You basically don’t know who gets on an aircraft in the states of Australia, so people have to provide at least some form of identification before they fly, that’s being transmitted between the states, in particular to the police, then at least we know that people who are a risk are on their way," he said.
"Clearly if people are flying between states and they are bikies or drug dealers, we should know."
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