Nathan Kelly is a single parent waiting to hear if he'll be relieved of a $5,600 hotel quarantine bill from Queensland Health — from a stay a year and a half ago.
He and his family travelled to Sydney to be with relatives in December 2020, after the mother of his children died suddenly.
When COVID-19 broke out in the northern beaches and Queensland shut its borders, they were denied a request to isolate at home in Cairns and instead were directed into a Brisbane hotel.
Mr Kelly says his professional wage is already stretched with household expenses, which is why he applied for a fee waiver after being issued an invoice in April 2021.
"I have asked for financial exemption, which I did in May last year. I followed up in September to ask how we're going with this, and then just two weeks ago they emailed me and said, 'we need further information'," he said.
"That weighs on you — no-one wants to owe five and a half thousand dollars to somebody. It's a significant amount of money … I think most normal people would agree."
Thousands of waiver requests unresolved
As of this month, Queensland Health has issued 84,463 invoices for hotel quarantine.
Of those, 21,401 people had applied for a quarantine fee waiver, and so far 4,639 have been approved in part or in full.
The remaining 16,762 people are either still having their applications processed or considered — or they've been rejected.
The ABC has spoken to several other people seeking fee exemptions, who don't want to be identified publicly.
One woman returned from overseas — where she'd overstayed her visa and was unable to work — in October 2020.
She paid around $10,000 for a business-class flight home, after an earlier economy ticket was cancelled amid caps on international arrivals.
She lodged a waiver application in December 2020 and was contacted for more information in April this year.
Another applicant is a student who was overseas studying when the pandemic broke out. He quarantined in Queensland at the end of 2020.
He waited several months to receive his invoice the following February, then submitted his application for a waiver. He'd assumed it had been accepted or it had been lost in the system, but then received a reply in May this year asking for further documents.
'A robust process'
A Queensland Health spokesperson said travellers can apply for waivers based on their circumstances.
"We understand the pandemic has caused financial stress for many Queenslanders, and we have been very mindful of these challenging circumstances when seeking payment for hotel quarantine stays," they said.
"We know border restrictions and quarantine arrangements were inconvenient, however, they were necessary to protect against the serious health risk of COVID-19 to more than five million Queenslanders.
"A robust internal process is undertaken in relation to quarantine fee waiver assessment to ensure circumstances relating to each application are considered appropriately."
The immediate past president of the Queensland Law Society, Elizabeth Shearer, said individuals don't have much grounds to contest the bills, other than use the waiver process and wait for a response.
"The situation is governed by amendments to the Public Health Act that the government introduced at the start of the pandemic, in early 2020," she said.
"This gives the government the right to require people to quarantine and pay for that quarantine.
"The Law Society's position during the pandemic was that the government was in a very difficult spot and the health emergency justified emergency legislation, so the fact that the first cut of this legislation lacked some of those usual review processes, or things like time frames, was not something that we took issue with.
"But two-and-a-half years later we still have a system without some of the usual checks and balances on decision making by government officials. These should have been restored.
"In this case it would be things like criteria for decision-making, time frames to issue invoices, time frames to make decisions and an independent merits review process."
Ms Shearer herself underwent hotel quarantine last year. She received her invoice several months later — after chasing it up herself.
"I ended up contacting the Health Department and got a bill issued, but that was at my instigation. It's a significant amount of money that's owing… I think it's not unreasonable for people to want to know, when am I going to get the bill and how long will the time frame be for the decision to be made about waiver."
Government accepts there is a backlog
On Friday, Health Minister Yvette D'Ath said applications are being given proper consideration.
"Any applications for either entering into a payment plan or an exemption, we're seeking to fast track those as much as we possibly can,'" she said.
"We do accept that there is a backlog, because our staff have been managing many different issues through COVID, but we are working our way through this."
As of this month, Queensland Health has referred 3,366 overdue invoices — with a value of $9.6million — to a debt collection agency — but wouldn't provide any information about how much debt collectors have recouped, saying it was considered commercial-in-confidence.
