The authorities had decided in July 2020 on strict confinement of the inhabitants of public buildings in Melbourne. They were completely forbidden to leave their accommodation and were constantly watched by the police.
Australia has long applied the zero Covid-19 strategy and in particular in the city of Melbourne, whose five million inhabitants were confined for a total of 262 days. But the restrictions were even more drastic for some 3,000 residents of HLM towers, who were subjected to very strict confinement for 14 days.
At the time of the second wave of Covid-19, in July 2020, dozens of cases were detected in these nine towers located north of Melbourne. At that time there was no vaccine yet. Moreover, such tall buildings in Australia are actually very rare. Even in large cities, the norm is the single-family home. Also to avoid contamination in the common areas, the authorities decided on strict confinement of the inhabitants, who had a total ban on leaving their accommodation and who were also constantly monitored by the police.
Some say they have been threatened by the police, and these drastic conditions, in these buildings where a very large part of the inhabitants are refugees from the Horn of Africa, have awakened painful trauma in some.
Compensation without excuse
The residents subsequently launched a lawsuit against the Victorian government, and the latter has just announced that it will pay them five million dollars in compensation (about three million euros). The case was revealed in the press on Wednesday May 10 and if there is a form of satisfaction among the residents, there is also a lot of bitterness because this government offer has only one goal: to make them give up their legal action, and above all, it is not accompanied by an apology.
The mediator of the State of Victoria, who had been seized of the case, had considered that this total confinement was indeed detrimental to the fundamental rights of the tenants of these buildings, that it had been imposed overnight, without even waiting the opinion of the health authorities, and that consequently the minimum that the government could do was precisely to apologize.
It is not yet known whether the plaintiffs will accept this proposal. No lawyer or resident wanted to answer our questions, perhaps because they have until next June 27 to decide if they accept the compensation or not and at this stage they have not yet slice.
This compensation is ultimately quite low, around 1,000 euros per person, but the plaintiffs are for the most part extremely poor, and with the general rise in prices due to soaring inflation, it will surely be difficult to resist. The Government of Victoria denies for its part having committed any deviation, and considers that it has, by acting in this way, saved many lives.