Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to rise to speak on this matter of public importance, and I thank the member for Rankin for putting it forward. I also thank the member for Rankin for acknowledging the work that the government has done and how far we have come during the pandemic. There's certainly an inference in the way the matter of public importance is written that we're at risk of losing that gain that we've made over the past 12 months. So it's good to hear that Labor is actually acknowledging that.

Of course there's no handbook for this pandemic. We haven't seen something like this for over a hundred years. I do acknowledge the words of the last speaker, who acknowledged all people around Australia for the hard work that they have done. When we shut down the borders on 24 February last year—earlier than any other country—we shut them down hard, and we did it for the health benefit and the economic benefit of our nation. We took those early steps knowing—having taken advice from the chief medical officers—that if we didn't take those actions, if we didn't take those steps, then, in comparison with the developed nations, we were looking at somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 deaths and, in the developing countries, somewhere in the vicinity of 45,000 deaths. But we didn't see that because of what our people did. People in our electorates, across the board, listened to the government, listened to the health officers and made huge sacrifices—none more so than the people in Victoria. In my electorate, we were lucky. I think we had two or three cases and, sadly, one death of a 94-year-old. The country made massive sacrifices to ensure that we are where we are now.

I try and remain as balanced as I possibly can. I'm happy to call my government out when they're not doing the right thing or when they haven't done the right thing, and I think I've proven that in the two short years that I've been here. But we can't ignore the economic facts. Unemployment is at 5.1 per cent. More people are in work than were in work prior to the pandemic. You can't ignore those facts. You can't ignore the fact that, only yesterday, 400,000 people around the world contracted COVID. You can't ignore the fact that 9,600 people around the world, sadly, passed away. You can't ignore the fact that, in the last six months, two million people around the world have passed away because of COVID—none of whom have died in Australia. Those facts are there in black and white. So to say that the government has not succeeded economically is simply not true. Certainly there were disruptions in supply affecting the vaccine rollout, and that's because countries jealously withheld those vaccines because they were seeing 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 deaths a day. The fact remains that the vaccine rollout is accelerating every single day. Indeed, there have been 700,000 vaccinations over the last seven days. More than 65 per cent of people over 70 are now protected and 45 per cent of people over 50. So we are making good inroads. Our economy is strong. Standard & Poor's agree with us. We've kept our AAA credit rating. There were 987,000 jobs created in the past quarter. I think we're doing well.

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