Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always interesting when the opposition look at ways to try to take some political points off the coalition government. With the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's been acknowledged right throughout the world that Australia's effort in looking after both the health of our people and the livelihoods of our people has probably not been surpassed by any other nation. So we now have the opposition trying to zero in and find some chinks where we have not done as well as we would have liked.

There's no problem with the Prime Minister acknowledging that we wish we had done better with our vaccine rollout, but, also, it's common knowledge that there's been so much hesitancy. There didn't seem to be a real panic in Australia and that has led to the lethargy and most Australians are not getting the vaccine. It's simply because we haven't been witnessing what we saw in the early stages of the virus in Italy, where the health system couldn't cope. As the assistant minister said earlier, we haven't seen the backhoes and the excavators building mass graves like we saw in New York. We haven't seen the incredible health failures that we've seen all around the world. We've seen the business community strengthened by JobKeeper and JobSeeker but then saw things rebound. It's as though some of the members that have spoken from Sydney have only just realised how damaging and how hurtful these lockdowns are. Unfortunately for us in Victoria, we've had a bit more experience than you have had in Sydney. We have a very strong understanding of the damage and the pain associated with lockdowns. We've been through five of them and we're about to go into our sixth. There's the whole concept about pain and damage to people's health, their mental health and their financial situation. We're well cross that in Victoria, because, even with the less contagious variant of COVID-19 that we had for the first seven or eight months, we had a state government in Victoria who refused to actually lock down the source of the virus, which was Melbourne. They simply just locked down the entire state. We then saw the reaction from New South Wales.

The other thing that's staggering with this debate is how many people love to use hindsight and then become incredibly smart with the use of hindsight. I'm sure that, if we all had hindsight in our back pocket and we could project what was going to happen into the future, we would have done a whole range of things slightly differently. Three months ago, the New South Wales' way of handling an outbreak was the gold standard. Everybody was envious of the New South Wales government's attitude and their practical way of chasing down these outbreaks: at the same time as closing down particular suburbs, they kept the rest of their state operational. They were held up as the gold standard on how to react to COVID. The new delta variant and the infectious nature of it, the way it is able to be passed on within 30 hours, has made the staying-open option one that doesn't seem to work. Again, we weren't to know this prior to the occasion. I would urge everybody who has a strong opinion, which is probably 70 per cent of Australians, to please understand that governments all around Australia are trying to work with the knowledge that they currently have at their disposal. Yes, they will be better educated into the future, but unfortunately we don't have that option in advance.

In relation to the quarantining, and Minister Gillespie spoke about this earlier, the federal government does have quarantining responsibilities, but what the states have captured and are never going to let go is the component around health orders. It's always the state imposed health orders that differentiate each state's performance. We need to be realistic about that as well.

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