Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Wow, that was a solo flight for me to follow, from the preceding speaker. No, baristas in this country won't decide whether to make a latte for people based on their vaccination status; let's make that very, very clear. But this is a good opportunity, I think, to range over what the previous speaker said. Victoria admitting that in fact delta is here to stay is exactly what the dynamics have told us for a couple of weeks now; and the race is to make sure that anyone at risk of hospitalisation, serious illness or death is in the vaccinated cohort. There were plenty of people 12 months ago saying that Australia would have the benefit of watching other countries begin vaccination programs. We wanted to see more safety data. There were very good reasons for us starting in late February, and the rollout has been exceptionally good. In many cases, in places in Queensland and WA, the race is not to get a vaccine; it's to get a booking slot. There's ample vaccine; we just can't get it into arms.

I want to take you back, if I could, Mr Speaker, to 7 April, when modelling from Doherty was released by government, predicting catastrophe—and of course this wasn't true. We knew two weeks earlier that this was a finite, not an exponential, spread. We completely over-egged alpha, which led to the shocking border shutdowns and huge costs that we saw last year. If COVID is an 800-metre race and we're in the bell lap—I hope we are—we were certainly wrong-footed by delta, a completely different challenge, as we now understand. On 29 March last year I went public and said Queensland's first wave would be under control in three to four weeks. I was attacked relentlessly by Labor, but I was one day out: on 26 April, the Premier signalled her intention to raise and remove some of these restrictions.

But the modelling didn't help us, and there has been a real failure by the experts, in many cases because we had experts trying to be politicians and politicians trying to sound like experts. I claim to be good at neither, but I'm honest enough to admit that we needed a certain bit of separation. It worked early on. The romance of national cabinet worked for us last year, but it broke down with that wildcard 8 August attack on the Prime Minister and the closure of borders based on the first Melbourne lockdown. This was completely unacceptable.

The public health challenge: is there a simpler one? I see my colleague the member for Lyne in the chamber. Is there a simpler challenge than passing food and loo paper through a hotel room door? We've had Queensland using 13 of their—wait for it—1,977 hotels for quarantine. We should be supporting the hotel sector by doing more quarantine and training more public health workers, but that simply hasn't happened. We should have lent before we spent on JobKeeper. Right from the start, HECS was there to provide long-term income-contingent lending to every business who needed a hand. We wouldn't be chasing Harvey Norman today if we'd provided some lending opportunities through Single Touch Payroll so that employers could have access to that same amount of money but pay it back if it wasn't needed. And every sector turned out to be different. There'd be more dollars for delta this year if we'd had a more cautious approach and used lend instead of spend last year.

The great story one day, I think, will be how we wouldn't touch a mask 12 months ago and now you get fined for not having one. There are people like Brendon Hempel, who, at a time when our own nation's PPE task force couldn't see it, organised 250 million masks to be imported, on 9 April last year. Everyone else was worried about respirators for an alpha strain that didn't need them.

The closure of international borders and DFAT's management of it, where you self-assess how much at risk you are, failed to ask a simple question of the million Australians overseas: do you have first-degree relatives permanently based in the country you're in, with all the supports you need? The limited seats on our aircraft have been consumed by Australians pulling out passports, too often from under the mattress of convenience, having decided to come home because things look a little cheerier in Australia than in the country they chose to move to two years ago. I think that's a fair point to be made.

Case numbers have been unclear. We haven't been accurately reporting case recovery. Hospital elective surgery shouldn't have stopped, but the reality is that hospitals are so perpetually at risk of being overwhelmed they had no choice.

Lastly, we've ended zero-debt thinking, and modern monetary policy has a new lease on life, but certainly we need to rethink growth theory, the idea that we need to be bringing in a certain number of people to this country to keep the economy strong. We're bringing no-one into this country at the moment and the economy is strong. I hope that promotes in this chamber a renewed debate about populations in this country.

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