Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I want to say thankyou to the member for Reid for her question. It's a very important one. The government has been working very closely with the health department. Across government, all agencies have been working very closely together. Agencies within the Department of Home Affairs, particularly at our borders, through the Commissioner of the Australian Border Force, Michael Outram, have been able to work with the airlines. As the Australian public knows, the Prime Minister made a decision, the right decision, to stop people coming in who weren't citizens or people in other categories, including permanent residents, who had been in mainland China on 1 February.

There is a significant logistical operation involved. As you would appreciate, the Commissioner of the Australian Border Force led that operation, and it's a great credit to him and to our staff at the airports. Obviously we don't want to put our staff in harm's way, but they were able to support people coming off those flights and redirect them into the hands of some medical advisors who were there at the airport and to turn some people back to their country of destination, and they made sure that this was all done in an orderly way.

The message, as the Minister for Health pointed out before, is that the government will respond to any of these instances. We will make sure, given we rehearse plenty of scenarios—the National Security Committee of cabinet comes together on a regular basis to look at ways in which we can respond to a crisis of this nature—that we put in place whatever resources are required to keep Australians safe. What we've had at the forefront is a desire to keep Australians safe here at home and to make sure that where Australians are stranded, whether it's in the Hubei or Wuhan province, wherever it might be, we can provide support to those people as well.

As Australians know, we have been able to repatriate, with the assistance of a chartered flight by Qantas, 241 people. Those people are currently in isolation and will be able to leave the Christmas Island facility when they get clearance from the doctors. This is a fast-evolving threat not just to our country but right across the world. We are working with the World Health Organization. We are meeting daily with all the state chief medical officers. All of us who are involved within the home affairs department will make sure we do whatever is possible to support the orderly transition at our airports of people, as I say, in whichever direction they need to go. We are doing whatever it takes to make sure we can deal with this virus. I really do want to commend the frontline officers from the home affairs portfolio, from the department. We will make sure we continue to do that work into the future to keep Australians safe both at home and abroad.

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