Multitude of bad decisions led to hotel quarantine failure, inquiry told

"An enormous immediate, unenviable burden was placed on those in public service to establish not one but a succession of infection control facilities in buildings clearly not designed for quarantine purposes."

Mr Neal said those who set up the program had done so with the best of intent and to the best of their ability. "Bad faith or corruption is not what the evidence shows," he said.

"Yet it is true that the hastily assembled program failed at two locations within approximately 2½ months and with disastrous consequences."

"A multitude of decisions, actions and inaction, many of which compounded the effect of the other, ultimately expressed itself in the outbreaks which subverted the very reason for the existence of a hotel quarantine program," he said.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachel Ellyard, said that while those who had designed the quarantine program had tried their best, it had the wrong focus.

"It remained a program for keeping people detained in hotels rather than a health response," she said. "Not withstanding the best efforts of many people, that focus [on health outcomes] was underdone."

On Saturday Jenny Mikakos resigned as Victoria's health minister after Premier Daniel Andrews had told the inquiry that he held her "accountable" for the ill-fated program that unleashed Victoria's disastrous second coronavirus wave.

The inquiry has also heard that ordinary government procurement rules were not followed, with a security firm that had previously been rejected as an approved official supplier winning most of the work of guarding the hotels.

The company, Unified Security, then relied almost entirely on subcontractors who used casual and part-timers to do the job.

The inquiry before Jennifer Coate will continue hearing closing submissions today, the final day of the inquiry.

The inquiry, announced by Mr Andrews in July, over 25 days of hearings heard from 63 witnesses – from those detained in hotel quarantine to those who designed it, delivered it on the ground, and those who held the highest offices in the state, including Mr Andrews himself. More than 290,000 pages of documents have been produced.

More to come