Russell Broadbent (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I say to the member for Kennedy that I expect there are some difficult health challenges in your part of Queensland that need to be addressed and I'm sure you're the right member in the right place at the right time to address those issues. I thank the member for Indi for putting on the table this matter of public importance on the urgent need to respond to the public health challenges facing the nation. I want to talk about one of the responses to those public health challenges and the way that response worked. I think just about all of us in this room would have received the benefit of a telephone conversation with your GP, rather than attending the clinic. In fact, during the pandemic the particular clinic that I have attended in Pakenham for many, many years just didn't want you in the building. They didn't want you anywhere near the place, unless it was necessary for you to come to the building, and then you had to either wait in your car or wait outside or wait at a certain point. This was very hard for older people, so the government introduced a telehealth system to address the crisis within communities.

I make this point because I felt through the 18 months that we've been living with this pandemic, a long time, one thing I haven't mentioned is that not only are our people concerned, disrupted and fearful but they're tired. They've worked hard. You have businesses that have worked for 30 years to build themselves up and have been blown away. They may have survived up to this point and then another lockdown finishes them off. That's the reality that we face. I've got a whole stack of emails here and that's exactly what's happened to these businesses. It's just heartbreaking for these people. They're angry, and I can understand their anger. But directing that anger is very difficult. I've always said to everybody in this House, when you're in a leadership position and you have to make a decision, put yourself in their position to say, 'What would you have done?' They say, 'Well, I wouldn't have made those mistakes.' No, but we all make mistakes. Things can go wrong and they will go wrong. We've seen governments right across the nation making decisions on the run the whole time. They had to make those decisions. You can criticise them and say they were right or they were wrong, or they should have been quicker, or they should have thought of this beforehand. But put yourself in the position of those leaders.

I go back to the way that we've handled the telehealth services. But it's expensive. I hadn't even thought about how much those telehealth services might have cost. As of 1 June 2021, 60.2 million health services have been delivered to 14 million patients at a cost of $3.1 billion paid to 84,395 practitioners who have benefited from that. It's expensive. A lot of what governments have done in this process—

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