Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Anyone travelling down Stirling Highway through Cottesloe in my electorate will come across a footbridge overpass which currently has hundreds of yellow ribbons flying from it. At first you might think these ribbons are flying for some festive occasion, but the reality is that each of these ribbons represents a Western Australian stuck overseas or struggling to meet the strict requirements to be able to travel back into Western Australia. Started by a constituent in my community, Jo D'Orsogna, it is designed to be a visual reminder, as we approach Christmas, that there are many families that cannot be together. Jo's son Stefano returned to Australia in March, as requested by the government, and quarantined with Jo and her husband for one month at home. In May, he returned to New York, where he owns a business, to restart the business after the lockdown in New York. He had a large sum of money invested in the business, plus he has a partner there, and it wasn't something he could walk away from at this stage in his life. Jo doesn't know when she will see Stefano again. Jo is not alone.

Western Australians are very mobile people. We move about the country and world more easily and in higher numbers than in generations past. According to the ABS, in 2019 nearly 50,000 people from overseas and 32,000 people from interstate moved to WA. In the same year 29,000 people left WA to live overseas and 36,000 moved interstate. We are also a very multicultural country. Over one-quarter of people responding to the 2016 Australian census were born overseas, and in WA the number was closer to one-third. Close to 40 per cent of WA's workforce were born overseas. Needless to say, a vast number of Western Australians have family and friends living outside our beautiful state.

When the COVID pandemic hit, restrictions on travel in and out of the country were a vital response to ensuring that we had time to build our capacity to deal with the virus from a health perspective. Similarly, it made sense to restrict movements within and beyond our state borders to help keep the virus contained. But now, six months later, when we are better prepared and we know more about what we are facing, it is time for us to be looking at whether we could be doing things differently.

While I'm sympathetic to those who say our state border closures are a small sacrifice to pay, my office, as I'm sure all other Western Australian offices are, is hearing the firsthand the pain of these families in the ever-increasing number of people contacting us trying to come home from overseas to Australia or seeking to travel into WA from interstate. These are not 'toughen up, Princess' situations. These are real people, with dying relatives, job losses, illnesses, family breakdown, mental illnesses. These losses, these deprivations and this pain is real. I've had a number of GPs contact me and tell me they are desperately worried about a number of their patients, and they are begging governments to do something. Similarly, there are businesses who are struggling to find skilled workers, struggling to bring in vital equipment and technology, and struggling to manage business operations which span the country.

I agree with those who say that we shouldn't prioritise the economy over lives, but a suffering economy damages people's lives. Assessing and comparing the economic consequences of potential courses of action is a vital part of the difficult and imperfect process of ascertaining the best course of action to take for all lives, both present and future. The reality is that the ability to move out and about within our country is how many of us live our lives and how our economy works. Any prolonged changes to that will have consequences on our economy and on our health, now and in the future. We need to be looking at ways that we can do this better, whether it be a variety of quarantine options, including home quarantine, or wearable monitoring devices. And we need, in WA, to go back to the fundamental plan: of testing, tracing and tracking—containment and suppression of the virus, not outright elimination, which, until we have a vaccine, is highly unlikely, and, even then, will be a while away. We need to be considering options for a sustainable, longer period of time.

I'm a proud Western Australian, and I love that our daily lives seem almost the same as they were pre COVID. While being an island within an island may have served us well to date, the current measures are fracturing us and are not sustainable. The yellow ribbons that have been tied by Jo and many other members in my community highlight that fracturing.

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