Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the Northern Territory’s Howard Springs COVID-19 quarantine facility may be needed to help get Australians stuck overseas home.

Speaking in Brisbane on Monday, Mr Morrison said he would discuss the plan with NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner in National Cabinet on Friday.

“Marise Payne, the Foreign Minister, is leading a team which has been ensuring we get Australians home from overseas, and where that facility may be needed to achieve that, it will be,” he told Seven News.

Howard Springs, the former Inpex workers’ camp, was used to house people returning from Wuhan and from the ship the Diamond Princess in February.
According to NT Government COVID-19 website on Tuesday afternoon there were 689 people in quarantine. Although some of those people people would have been in the Alice Springs facility.

Mr Gunner said there about 3,500 beds in Howard Springs but capacity is reduced when people are broken up into different cohorts.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told media that three-quarters of the 38,200 Australians overseas registered with the Federal Government said they wanted to come home.

Mr Gunner told ABC Darwin radio on Monday morning the biggest limitation on Howard Springs would not be bed numbers but staff.

“It’s not that we had those people just sitting out there on a shelf waiting to be tapped, they had other jobs,” he said.

“So the conversation the Australian Government, it’s not a straight dollar conversation, it goes, how do you manage your people resources out there in a sustainable way?

“…we’ve got to have conversations about how we’re managing and paying for and supporting all the staff that will be out there doing that work.”