James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance about the situation Australia is in today in dealing with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it's important to begin by reflecting on some of the very important, early, strong decisions that this government made that mean the things we're talking about today are very different from what they could have been if we as a government, under the Prime Minister's leadership, hadn't made those very significant early decisions that have kept us safe and, comparatively, in such a strong position compared to so many other nations around the world.

One of the first significant decisions that the government made was to close our international border, first directly with China and then extending that to closing the border to everyone except for Australian citizens and permanent residents seeking to return home, and other limited types of exemptions. This was an enormous decision. Looking back on it now, of course, we've confronted so many other significant challenges that are once-in-a-lifetime type challenges, but at that time I'd never thought that in my lifetime we would have a situation where we would need to close the border of this nation to the rest of the world. It was an enormous decision to have taken, and, as we reflect in hindsight on what might have occurred if we hadn't decided to put such a strong border in place, we would be in a very, very different position today in dealing with the challenge of defeating this COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the second really significant things early on was the decision of the Prime Minister to create and form the national cabinet structure, which meant that he could bring together the leaders of all the other governments around this country, state and territory. This is vitally important because, of course, it would be impossible for the Commonwealth government alone to deal with all the various complexities of the challenges of COVID, both economic and health. One of the obvious ones is that it is the state and territory jurisdictions that manage the health system. If you were not coordinating, collaborating and working with those jurisdictions, it would have been impossible for us to have had the success that we have had on the health front, but also on the economic front and some of the other important things that have required cooperation over the last 18 months between the Commonwealth government and the state and territory jurisdictions. I think that reform is one that is going to be quite enduring beyond the immediacy of the COVID response. It's a great credit to the Prime Minister for the judgement he showed and the decisions that he made to create that.

The third was our economic response, which had an enormous number of elements—most significantly, as we know, the JobKeeper program, which undoubtedly held our economy together through the early months of the entire country being locked down and the challenges that different jurisdictions met at different times when they had to take localised decisions around lockdowns and constricting their economies. There was the JobKeeper program, as well as the supplementary payments of JobSeeker and other Commonwealth entitlements, early access to super, the small business support packages, instant asset writedowns—all those things. All those decisions were made to ensure that we were providing as much economic support and stimulus whilst we dealt with the very early and severe restrictions that had to be put in place in our economy to protect people from the health point of view.

Now, 18 months later, we find ourselves in an enviable position, thanks to the early decisions that were made by this government under the leadership of our Prime Minister. We are now rolling out a vaccination program. More than a million doses were delivered in the last six days—an amazing logistical effort that is being done in a methodical way, following all the usual sensible precautions that should be followed when it comes to any major public health decisions, like rolling out a vaccination program. Now we are on track, given the announcement made yesterday by the Prime Minister, supported by information from the Doherty Institute, to see ourselves reach vaccination milestones and be able to gradually, but importantly, reopen the economy and the society of this country and have something to look forward to in the post-pandemic world of Australia, our future, having dealt with and hopefully learnt to live with the challenges of COVID-19. I commend our government, the Prime Minister in particular, for that leadership and I look forward to the coming months as we continue to implement the important plans we have to see us through this great challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Debate adjourned.

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