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

I thank the honourable member for her question and her keen interest in making sure that we can help Australians recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously the federal government, from the very early days of this year, have been involved in making crucial decisions. We closed our international borders and, at that stage, the Defence Force were involved in that decision and they helped us carry out that decision. We have made decisions in relation to providing support to a number of areas across the country.

In particular, I really want to acknowledge the work of the Australian Defence Force and the work that they did in Victoria. In July, Commodore Mark Hill from the Royal Australian Navy and Colonel Bec Taylor from the Army were deployed to Victoria to provide senior military logistics and planning support to assist the Victorian DHHS in ramping up and improving contact tracing. Obviously there was a real concern in Victoria about the adequacy of the contact tracing, and the Defence Force have gone in to provide their expertise and to provide support to the Victorian government to help it get its standards up to where New South Wales and the other states were.

Mr Husic interjecting—

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