"The latest lockdown of Victoria sends the message to industry that this can and will happen at any time, which makes business planning impossible and investment problematic," Innes Willox, Chief Executive of the national employer association Ai Group said today.
"Victoria suffered 111 days of lockdown as a direct result of the State's failed quarantine system. That experience should have led to the creation of a gold-plated approach to quarantine but instead it has failed again at great cost to the community.
"Victoria's response looks to be disproportionate to the risk. Thousands of businesses which have struggled to stay open must be thinking that Victorian authorities have no weapon to deal with small COVID outbreaks other than locking their citizens in their homes.
"As has been shown in other states, there is a better way to deal with small outbreaks and that is through better testing and tracing and localised area responses.
"Victoria needs to significantly improve on its approach to quarantine, testing and tracing and avoid the sugar hit of shutting down an entire state and locking up communities that would have virtually zero chance of seeing a single virus case. It is hard to fathom why remote country towns are being treated the same as suburban Melbourne," Mr Willox said.
