An interesting article.

MANY PROBLEMS WITH IT:

- "travellers would have to pay for their food and essentials" what if they come with no money or no money convertable to Aus dollars?

- hardship of being in a virtual prison camp (ex WWII) updated to a refugee-like prison is not what Australian citizens would appreciate.

MAIN PROBLEM: How to get guards and support staff who way outnumber those being quarantined to live in and share such isolation? They would expect fly in/fly out on miners' wages = $200,000+ per year.

Also isloated guards and support staff may be just as vulnerable to catching Covid. And extra layer of pilots and hosties even more so.

Thus blowing out any cost savings and still spreading Covid whenever guards, supports, pilots and hosties fly back into cities.

"Immigration provides 60 per cent of our annual population increase …".

Well it damn well shouldn't ! There should be no population increase anywhere in the world. The mass immigration Ponzi scheme of both Liberal and Labor is suicidal. There is nothing more hideous than immigration when 'concern' for ecology and climate is all the rage. The drop in immigration and foreign students is the only good thing the China virus has done for us. Morrison has rightly told universities to adjust their business models (not that education was ever meant to be a business); the same should apply to everyone else. Small and efficient does the job. As long as people of working age in Australia are not actually working, immigration should off the agenda indefinitely - virus or no virus.

Don Aitkin has wandered off the track, as has this "correspondent" of his

P.S.

Article's "no one will escape, so guard costs would be tiny. There is no point in escaping, for there is nowhere to go in such isolated areas up north, only kangaroos and crocodiles"

is waste-of-time flippant.

Guards still needed to stop the quarantined from different huts: mixing, rooting, fighting, breaking things and still escaping (as quarantine escapees dying of thirst in the desert or very bad PR (lack of duty of care) for State Premiers and Morrison.

Guards are still needed to keep order like policemen and NOT as prison camp-like-armed guards.

HOW do COVID-19 + people even get onto a plane to come here ??
No more migrants for the next 5 years ! Any Australians want to live overseas, stay overseas !
The days of willy nilly gallivanting around the Globe are over, pinis, finito !
Only essential travel for the next two years !
Make young Australians do the work of Visa tourists for a few years till we recover.

Hi Don

I'm looking for quarantine on similar country military base examples: wide open spaces of US and Canada come up.

US BASES

Here's an interesting one http://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-military-bases-coronavirus-quarantine-locations-2020-2?r=US&IR=T of Feb 16, 2020

This week, more than 200 evacuees were released from federal quarantine at military bases in California.

The Department of Defence and CDC have approved at least 15 US MILITARY BASES quarantine camps. Here’s where they are.

...Five primary bases – three in California, one each in Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas – can hold up to 1,000 quarantined people.
____________________

CANADIAN BASES

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-first-group-of-quarantined-canadian-evacuees-released-from-military/ Feb 20, 2020

"As the country’s first coronavirus quarantine ends, the hundreds of Canadians who have been isolated at Canadian Forces Base Trenton over the past 14 days prepared to return to their everyday lives.

...Four hundred and thirteen people have been quarantined at the [likely Trenton] military base following evacuation from the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China...

The first group of evacuees, who arrived Feb. 7, [2020] are to be released Friday.

...As a thank you for their care, they raised more than $35,000 in donations among themselves for the Canadian Red Cross, said evacuee Li Xin Cheng, who led the fundraising effort along with two others in quarantine..."

COMMENT

From search trends US and Canada may have only experimented with Military Base Quarantine in early 2020. Could be US and Can Govts then turned to hotel quarantine as standard practice.

Hotel Quarantine does seem to be a catastrophe waiting to happen. Stopping all incoming would be a much better idea.

The pandemic has given us the opportunity to fix our excessive migration system. We have already changed the population mix much to the determent of existing citizens, & it is time to rejig the economy to make it work without building housing for millions of often unsuitable migrants.

The last thing we need is even grossly larger cities, inhabited by people who can't even talk to each other, with little in common, but their address.

Time to rethink the model, before we totally stuff the place.