Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I would like to concur with the member for Page in saying that the real heroes in this situation that we are facing are the Australian people. Australia has done remarkably well, because the Australian people did what they knew they had to do. I think there are very few countries in the world that would have responded in the way that our people have responded—for example, in taking up the COVIDSafe app, which, in spite of people's misgivings, many millions of Australians have done; complying with the health regulations; complying with social distancing; not going into work but working from home; and putting up with the difficulties of homeschooling their children. All of these things have helped us have a response that is hardly matched throughout the world. New Zealand is perhaps the only other country that's been able to match our response overall. So the Australian people are the heroes, and I concur with the member for Page and I thank him.

I also want to thank the Minister for Health, the member for Flinders, and the shadow health minister, Chris Bowen, for their contribution to this debate. I want to also thank and note the minister for his response to and his handling of the entire COVID-19 pandemic. I also want to thank him for appointing me to the NHMRC COVID-19 health and research group. I am very grateful to him for allowing me to take part in the management of this crisis. I also want to acknowledge and congratulate Professor Brendan Murphy, the Chief Health Officer of the Commonwealth, who has done an absolutely remarkable and outstanding job; our Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Michael Kidd, who's been coordinating the scientific and research response; and those in their team who have worked so tirelessly in recent months to form our response to this pandemic.

It seems like a very short time ago that we were hearing about this pandemic. I remember being at a dinner party in January with some legal friends of mine who were asking me whether we should be concerned about this arising of the virus from the Wuhan in China and what we should be concerned about. I said that we should be concerned, but it was an evolving situation and it was still unclear what was happening. Now, six months later, it is still an evolving situation. We are by no means out of this. This pandemic is the greatest health crisis of my career. I was working as a paediatrician at the beginnings of the HIV epidemic in the early 1980s. I remember those times. People were talking about this as being the greatest medical crisis of our generation of health workers. Well, this has surpassed it by far. It is still evolving.

There are many people we have to congratulate. First of all, as I've said, I think the Australian people are the real heroes in this situation. As a health worker myself, I'm very proud of all of my colleagues—nursing colleagues, laboratory staff, doctors, intensivists. At my local hospitals the unity of purpose has been really overwhelming. Thank God, so far we haven't needed all the health resources that we were preparing. We are very grateful for that. But I know how hard everyone has worked to try and put together a response and prepare us for what could have been much, much worse than we've seen. We're very lucky. So far, because of our national response, we have been able to avoid some of the disasters that I've heard of from my colleagues who have worked in other countries. My daughter Amelia works for Medecins Sans Frontieres. She's based in Germany, but she deals with teams throughout the world. She describes to me some of the terrors that have faced and are facing their teams in countries like Italy and Spain and in Asia and South-East Asia. Amelia's worked with teams and been to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. They are facing an absolute disaster with the Rohingya refugees in the refugee camps there. It's an evolving tragedy, as it is evolving around the world. In Africa, in South America and in some of the disadvantaged countries of South-East Asia we are really facing continuing disasters, day after day. We can be very thankful in Australia for our response. Our response has been a bipartisan one, and I think people on both sides need to be congratulated for all this, not only in the federal government but in state governments.

We should be very pleased with our response, but we need to be vigilant. The pandemic is unfortunately far from over. Our society will still be required to adapt to cope with this crisis for many months, probably years. In particular, we have evolving situations with how we are going to deal with some of the unusual behaviours of this virus. We know that a significant number of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic. That is a big challenge for what we are going to do with our international trade and whether we are going to open our borders. If we are going to have asymptomatic people and presymptomatic people—in other words, people who carry the virus before they develop symptoms—are we going to be able to open or borders? It is virtually impossible to detect those people unless we screen everyone. That is going to be a major difficulty that our country must face, as indeed other countries with closed borders will need to face.

In Australia, we have done very well. Our state borders will hopefully all be opened up very soon. What we do with our international borders is a much, much bigger dilemma. The information about that is still coming forward and needs to be investigated much further before we can open our international borders. That is a major issue, not just for our trade, but also for our universities and for our population who were born overseas, with things like family reunions et cetera. This is a major issue that is still to be resolved.

As I have said, we are very, very lucky. We've had fantastic health responses. I would also like to single out the ABC and the coverage they have given to this crisis, and in particular my good friend Norman Swan, who is the foremost medical communicator in our country and probably one of the best in the world. He has a reputation that extends far beyond Australia. Norman has done a fantastic job. As Norman has said, we have done very well. The fact we have done very well and we haven't faced the disasters of Italy, Spain, England and the United States is really a tribute to everyone in Australia, not just the health system.

Of course there are naysayers who are saying that this is a minor epidemic and it would have been coped with anyway. That is certainly not true. It is still evolving, and we must be forever vigilant. I would like to thank the ABC and Norman Swan for their continuing coverage of this. I thank every day every Australian, and particularly those in my electorate, who are doing their best to continue with the policies that are enabling us to stay virtually free of community spread. We have done very well. I'm not an alarmist. I'm generally an optimist, but I think it is essential for all Australians to understand the gravity of the health situation that is still there. I realise the enormous economic effects of this pandemic. I'm not belittling them. This predominantly remains a health crisis, and the solutions will come through health policy, not through economic policy. We owe it to each of the people in Australia that have died and those who have developed the illness to make sure that we maintain our health vigilance. I will continue to encourage each and every Australian to download the COVIDSafe app. This is a technological way of speeding up contact tracing and helping us manage any outbreaks that occur in our community. Hopefully they will be few, but everything we can do to reduce them will increase the chances of opening up our society.

I would also like to say that, economically, I think we need to make sure that we take care of the disadvantaged. They will be the people that will suffer the most, as they do in most health outbreaks. I acknowledge that some in our society express concerns about the lockdown and the necessity for it. It was important. We have done very well. Let's not drop the ball now. Let's continue with our vigilance.

I will end my contribution to this debate by saying that I believe all that needs to be said already has been said, but I will stress the following: everyone listening should continue practising social distancing, keep maintaining good hygiene practices and think selflessly about the health of our nation.

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