Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

We all, not only in this Chamber, this House, this building, the state of New South Wales, the country of Australia but, indeed, around the whole globe, are going to remember 2020. We have defining moments in our lives, we have defining moments as a nation and, indeed, the globe has defining moments in its history as well. For us all as individuals, this is a defining moment; as a country, this is a defining moment; and, as a globe, this is a defining moment. Who could have foreseen at the start of 2020 how this was all going to play out? Just in my region, last year we had fires and we had drought, and they were tough. They certainly tested the resilience of my community, which was ravaged by both. But this is taking us to a whole new level of resilience, perseverance and strength of character because this is not just a local, community based thing or, indeed, a national thing; it's a global challenge that we're facing.

There's been a lot of anxiety in my community, as I'm sure there has been in all the communities we live in. We will all remember when we started to become more aware and educated about this virus and the decisions that we were going to have to make, as well as the consequences those decisions were going to have on people's lives and livelihoods. We will all remember how the partial shutdown started. There were unprecedented things, in the sense that people were questioned when they went to work, where they were going and whether they were really required to go to work. We've had things like internal and international border closures and we shut down our country to international students—things that we really could never have imagined.

I want to acknowledge a whole lot of people today. I want to acknowledge them across governments. There are frontline health and service workers, and just Australians themselves, who have saved us because of the type of people they are. They have saved us a lot of pain. Let's start with the PM. We're talking a lot about economics at the moment and the consequences the lockdown has had on jobs and people's livelihoods. The PM 'got' this. A lot of countries went to a harsher lockdown. The PM and the government were under a lot of pressure at one stage to lock down more than we did. If we had, the economic consequences we're talking about now would be worse. You can't walk away from that.

Very early on, in one of the addresses he gave, he said that every job is essential. He said we were going to shut down organisations or businesses where contagion was a higher risk. We would do that because of the health risks, but we were not going to do what some countries did, where only the supermarkets and the pharmacies were open. He said that went too far, that the economic consequences would be too great, and we didn't need to do that. He was under much pressure to do more, but he held the line on that. I think that was a great decision and it showed that he got it right at the start. We're still dealing with two things, but the health crisis that we faced was at least managed, and the management of the economic crisis will be as great, if not greater. The 'every job is essential' line was very important for us to understand that.

I want to thank the Australian public. The national cabinet has done a great job. I acknowledge Greg Hunt as the federal health minister. I acknowledge all the health ministers from every state in this country, as well as all the health panels and experts that have been advising governments every step of the way. They've done a great job and should be congratulated. I want to thank Australians. In my community, when we all saw Bondi packed that Sunday, we said: 'Maybe this isn't where we should be. From what we're told, that increases the risk of the virus being spread.' I noticed that the behaviour changed in my community. We as Australians 'got' that. Australians 'got' the importance of social distancing, 'got' the importance of hygiene and made this better for us. As a collective, Australians 'got' it and reacted. They reacted as a community, and there was a health benefit for fellow Australians. Because of that, there is also an economic benefit.

I want to thank the national cabinet. I think it was a great initiative of the Prime Minister. It crossed party boundaries, which was very important. The Australian people certainly didn't want to see partisan politics, and they didn't. They wanted to see the states acting, they wanted to see messages that they understood and they wanted to see that we were acting on those messages. As part of the national cabinet, the state premiers and the chief ministers were involved. No-one's ever going to agree on everything all the time—I get that—but I think they had a solidarity about them and they knew that partisan politics wasn't part of this. At such a very crucial time, it was a great effort by everyone involved.

During our heaviest shutdown, we were very aware of the important people in our community. They are the people that we talk about: the frontline health workers; the people at the check-outs; the truck drivers who were delivering things around this country—sometimes the only things on the road were the trucks; the supply chains; the farmers; everyone producing our food; and everyone producing the essential goods and services that we need. Those people were there, they didn't miss a beat, and they deserve our great thanks as a nation. We all know individuals in our communities who did that. As a nation, we are thankful to all those people.

Touch wood, but we aren't out of this health crisis yet. My learned colleague over there, the member for Macarthur, would know this better than I. This doesn't disappear. This will be around a long time. We have managed it to a degree. 'Flatten the curve' was the mantra—and we did. So I think we've done a great job there. But there is also the economic impact. We are dealing with a double crisis now. We have lost significant numbers of jobs. The unemployment rate, the number of jobs and the underemployment rate that have been mentioned are all true. This is now an ongoing thing that we will need to manage for many, many years.

I don't mean to be alarmist but, if you look at the history of the world, whenever there is a massive economic contraction such as we've seen around the world—it compares to economic depressions et cetera in the thirties—it sometimes leads to a world that is less safe and where you get, for example, nationalist movements and people are fearful. Weird things happen when people lose livelihoods and jobs. So the decisions that we make as a country, as the Prime Minister said earlier today, over the next two months and over the next three years, four years or five years, are important for not only our country and our people but also the globe. Lots of decisions are being made all around the globe right now. The decisions that we make as a country and the decisions made by other world leaders for the next little while are going to map out the future for our planet and everyone on it. So it is a very important time. I know everyone in this chamber has good intentions. Even though we will disagree on some things, I know that we all want to get people back to their jobs, to their livelihoods and to where they were as best we can—and we want that for the globe.

I was reading about this the other day, and it is quite amazing when you think how quickly things have moved. On 21 January, we heard—and for a lot of Australians it would have been the first time that they had ever heard these words—that the human coronavirus with pandemic potential was added to a list of human diseases. That's not that long ago, really. We know that, as Australians, we did very well. We were ahead of the curve. We listed it before the World Health Organization really treated it in the same way we did. That put us on the front foot. Blocking international students and some other international travel gave us some breathing space to get our act together in different ways.

I won't be able to get through all of this list, but I will mention some of the entries. On 11 March, we announced a $2.4 billion health package which covered a whole lot of areas. The next day, we announced a $17.6 billion economic response to the crisis. We were here; we came back to parliament to pass it. I think 'Harry Hindsight' is smart, but at the time that was perceived to be a pretty good response. It was targeted to small business. It was targeted to help the economic response to this. Then, on 13 March, we established the national cabinet, which was a very important part of our response. On 22 March, nine days later, we announced—because, obviously, everyone was becoming much more aware of what this was really going to be—the $66 billion economic response. That was about income support for individuals, a supplement, and boosting cash flows for business. On 29 March, which was just a week later, there was money announced for telehealth and for domestic violence, mental health and community support packages. Then, on 30 March, the day after, we announced the JobKeeper payment—and I have a list of other things we did post that with different industry health packages and the HomeBuilder scheme. This is an important time in our history. We have a big job to do, and we will do it.

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