Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much to the member for Herbert for his question. He is a very proud North Queenslander and he does us very proud in this place. The government is obviously concerned, as all Australians are, about what is happening in West Africa with people losing their lives to Ebola.

We have provided significant support—$42 million in total—to help people in West Africa. To make sure that we can provide support on the ground we have contracted with the great Australian company Aspen to provide up to $20 million of funding so that in concert with the United Kingdom we can provide a 100-bed facility.

But of course this does not happen by chance. There is a lot of work that must go into these sorts of contracts. We must consider the way that we can deal with Australian health workers if they contract the virus in West Africa. We have to make sure that we have assurances around evacuation. Given that there is a 50 per cent fatality rate for health workers in West Africa, we need to make sure that we can provide those health workers with the health support that they need, if they contract the virus from those whom they are treating. This is absolutely essential, and it would be reckless of any government that sent health workers into harm's way without having properly contemplated how it is that you could put this contract and these operations into place.

We had a number of meetings of the National Security Committee. We took advice from the Chief of Defence. I met on countless occasions with the Chief Medical Officer. We had advice from the head of border protection and security. We spoke with all of those people in the United Kingdom and the United States, our partners abroad, and we came, as a government, to a reasonable position of which we should all be very proud.

But there is a contrast in approach here. This contrast in approach is best evidenced by the member for Sydney. The member for Sydney was a hopeless health minister. She was a hopeless minister for homelessness, and she demonstrated incapacity on this issue—

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