Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Boothby, who has been a great advocate for the conversion and rehabilitation of the Repat hospital and the Commonwealth investment in the creation of a brain and spinal unit to help people suffering from some of the most devastating injuries and conditions imaginable.

During the course of this year, we've focused, of course, not just on chronic conditions and injuries but on COVID-19. As at today, we know that there are over 67 million cases worldwide and well above 1½ million lives have been lost, agonisingly. We compare that with the fortunate situation of Australia. The advice I have from the National Incident Centre is that there are no cases of community transmission, again, in Australia today. In the last week, almost 99 per cent of cases have arrived from overseas and been contained and detected within quarantine, and there has been one case from within the community in Australia. In particular, there are no Australians in ICU or on ventilation, on the latest advice that I have. We remember when, in February, March and April, this nation witnessed the tragedy and the horror in Italy, in France, in Spain and in New York, where there was a struggle for ventilation. Even now we see systems under strain around the world, both in the developed and developing worlds.

As part of that, we prepared throughout that period to make sure that Australia not only flattened the curve with our containment to protect lives here but that we built our capacity to make sure we were never in the same situation as that faced by some other countries. I recently had the pleasure of visiting, with the member for Mitchell, ResMed. ResMed is a great Australian company. Their premises in Sydney sees over 1½ thousand workers on site. They switched their production, moving from one shift to three shifts. They worked around the clock, building ventilators: 7,000 ventilators to make sure that Australia had the capacity where, if we faced the worst of all possible outcomes, we were covered.

This was something that the Prime Minister was insistent upon in February and March, to say that we would never face what other countries had. And so we fought as a country to contain but also build that capacity, and we have done that. That's something, as we look back upon this year, for which we must be thankful and grateful as a nation—that our Australian people have achieved this. This is their achievement, and we acknowledge them and thank them. This is what has underpinned the economic revival and the economic comeback: that central health achievement of the nation. (Time expired)

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