2023-05-11 12:34:04
Residents of nine public housing towers in Melbourne had been confined to their homes by police for several days. WILLIAM WEST / AFP
The government is offering compensation to 3,000 residents stranded at home by the police for several days after the detection of cases of Covid-19 in their buildings.
Five million Australian dollars. This is what the Victorian government is offering Melbourne residents as compensation for the very strict confinement to which they were subjected in July 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. A financial agreement proposed to avoid a lawsuit, the 3000 people concerned, residents of nine large buildings of social housing, having taken the government to court.
At the time, Australia had a policy of “zero covid» and the inhabitants of Melbourne have been imposed no less than six strict confinements, until the last at the end of 2021, causing the population to be fed up. In July 2020, after the appearance of 23 cases among the residents of these social housing towers, the Premier of Victoria announced in a press conference their immediate quarantine to avoid contagion.
Police presence
The police then surrounded the buildings, preventing their inhabitants from leaving for five days for the most part, up to two weeks in one of the towers. Denouncing this forced quarantine that they consider “illegal”, miscommunication from the authorities, food supply problems and the trauma caused, 3,000 residents therefore launched a class action lawsuit against the government in March 2021.
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Those who agree to drop the charges will split the sum of five million Australian dollars (about three million euros), including the children, who will receive a half share if they were under 16 at the time. Many, however, simply wanted the government to recognize that it had made a mistake by taking disproportionate measures. “I’m just waiting for an apology, nothing more“, slips a resident in the local newspaper The Age .
Until now, the government has always refused to do so. His spokesperson reaffirmed, without commenting on this specific case, that the anti-Covid measures “were needed to protect all the people of Victoria and save lives».
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