Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is no doubt about it: COVID has been an absolute tragedy globally. In excess of 170 million people have caught the disease, and in excess of 3½ million people have died. In the United States, 555,000 people have died. That's basically more than the First World War, the Second World War and the Vietnam and Iraq wars combined. In England, in excess of 120,000 people have died. Each one of those lives is as precious as the other. There is no way to calibrate the worth of a life. But what you can say is that Australia has done very well, on that morbid statistic. Fewer than a thousand people in Australia have died from COVID. That is an exceptional outcome. We hoped it would be zero—Greenland has had zero deaths—and we have to strive towards that.

It seems evident that the epicentre of the disease in Australia has been Victoria. Someone has to call into question the management by the state government in Victoria. If the Victorian Labor government are incapable of managing the COVID epidemic, then they should hand it over to somebody who can. There's been a massive expenditure by the government, almost totally on borrowed money, to make sure that we do what we can to alleviate the financial concerns and try to get ourselves to the other end here, but it's not an unlimited cheque book. It just can't go on. This money has to be repaid. What I find an incredible frustration is hearing members from the Greens talk about wanting to spend more money. Then, in the next breath, they're saying we need to ban coal and gas and the live cattle trade. They want us to ban the mechanism that earns the export dollars for this nation.

It shows that there is an inconsistency and, some would say, an economic insincerity in their request. They're never able to show you exactly where the money that they want spent comes from. It just becomes an ambit claim. Anyone can make an ambit claim, but it's only the coalition or the Labor Party that have to make the books stack up, that have to work out where this money is going to come from and how our path out of our current debt is going to be achieved. If your benevolence is authentic, you need to stand behind it and be strong enough to say, 'We must also show you where the money we want spent will come from and how we'll make sure our economy becomes as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible, so we can achieve that outcome.' What you also find with the Greens is that, once they get perturbed, frustrated or incompetent in an argument, they just go to an argument ad hominem. There is really no depth or substance to what they say. That's fair enough. You can be a barking oracle in here. It's quite easy, but it doesn't take our nation anywhere.

I'm happy that in my electorate of New England we are getting on with the COVID vaccine rollout. We are getting through the population. In Australia, around four million people have received the vaccination, and about one million have received two doses. So the program is rolling ahead. You may say, 'Where is perfection?' I don't know where that resides, but the fact that Australia has managed to control the cataclysmic death toll seen in other countries, I would say, has to be a big tick for the government. I would say that anyone looking around the world would have to say that it's thanks to the grace of the government—and luck—that we do not have the problems being experiencing elsewhere. I would say our government has done an exceptional job, and I'm not known for giving away glib praise just for the sake of it.

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