Victoria Police recommended private security be used for Victoria's hotel quarantine program as the "first line of security'', the inquiry into the botched scheme has heard.
According to evidence from Victoria Police northwest metro region Commander Tim Tully, the chief commissioner at the time, Graham Ashton, recommended "that private security is to be the first line of security" in the hotels.
Commander Tully was in charge of Victoria Police's Operation Soteria, which oversaw the hotel quarantine program.
The evidence follows weeks of debate over the Victorian Government's decision not to use defence force personnel or police to monitor hotel quarantine.
Commander Tully told the inquiry he did not think police were needed inside the hotels and said it would not be a good use of their time.
He said during 109 days of the program, there were 131 calls for police assistance and only five were deemed serious calls.
"My view at the time was [a 24/7 police presence] certainly wasn't required and it would be an inefficient use of police resources," he said.
"A 24/7 police presence would ultimately require a number of resources to come from the frontline … and there were competing demands for very finite police resources," he said.
Commander Tully said he was initially told before the program began that police officers would be supporting private security guards by patrolling the hotels.
But he said he was later told private security would be used and the role of police would be to create a cordon around passengers arriving at the hotels, to stop media, the public and the guests' families from approaching them.
It was also police officers' jobs to respond to incidents inside the hotels when they were called.
Commander Tully told the inquiry he was not aware of any requests made for a 24/7 police presence inside the hotels, despite the inquiry previously hearing of claims a request was made by the Department of Jobs, Regions and Precincts.
Returned travellers allowed to temporarily leave without supervision
The inquiry into the system, led by former judge Jennifer Coate, has previously heard more than 99 per cent of Victoria's second wave is connected to returned travellers.
Some 90 per cent of the state's cases are linked to a family of returned travellers, according to genomic modelling provided to the inquiry.
The inquiry earlier heard returned travellers could leave quarantine hotels unsupervised, some for several hours a day and multiple times a week, to visit sick relatives and attend funerals.
Guests were placed "in transport" to go out into the community on compassionate grounds or for medical treatment and emergencies, but there were no audits to make sure people were going where they said they were, a senior health department official told the inquiry.
Noel Cleaves, an environmental health regulation and compliance manager with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), said most cases were not supervised after they left the hotels.
"There were occasions generally at the start of the program where we did provide supervision [of guests who left] but they were relatively rare," he said.
He said, predominately, the person was issued with temporary leave permission, then was advised of the penalties for failing to comply and given personal protective equipment and the advice to wear it.
"And then they were placed in transport and sent to wherever they needed to be with their relatives," he said.
Under questioning from counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachel Ellyard, Mr Cleaves said there were no random audits of people's activities to check they were actually doing the things they had been allowed leave to do.
"There were examples, people did check with funeral directors to make sure the person was happy for them to come to the funeral, or if the hospital was not willing to grant the person permission to visit the facility," he said.
"But there was not close supervision of the person when they left the hotel."
Only two senior authorised officers in charge at start of quarantine program
Mr Cleaves's role during the hotel quarantine program was as a senior DHHS authorised officer, who oversaw all the other authorised officers working in quarantine.
He told the inquiry the work was the most intense he had ever experienced in his 35-year career.
"We worked very long hours in the first weeks … we would work 16 to 18 hours a day." Mr Cleaves said.
He said authorised officers focused on compliance at quarantine hotels and were recruited from different government departments as the demand grew, and most did not have health or infection control backgrounds.
"There is not a stock of authorised officers with public health training in sufficient numbers to run a hotel quarantine program," Mr Cleaves said.
"It just does not exist in Victoria and I'd be surprised if it existed in other places in the world."
The inquiry heard that at the beginning of the program there were only two senior authorised officers to run the program.
He said that number grew to 17, but the officers were not solely responsible for hotel quarantine, with some responding to outbreaks at an abattoir in Colac, in the state's south-west.
Mr Cleaves was unable to answer questions about who was meant to be in charge of supervising the security guards working at the quarantine hotels.
