Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As much as I like my good friend the member for Moreton, I won't necessarily agree with everything he had to say. He might find that rather unsurprising, I might add. I'm delighted to rise and speak on this motion from the member for North Sydney. We have seen over the past few days how quickly things have changed with the advent of the omicron variant of COVID-19. But the advent of this new variant, and some of the restrictions that have been put in place as a result for people who are coming from high-risk countries—and I won't go through them all—are important. We have stopped direct flights from those countries for the time being, but Australian citizens, permanent residents and immediate family members who have been in those countries will still be able to return home. They'll be required to undertake 14 days of quarantine in a managed facility, and they'll have to make the appropriate declarations.

More broadly, I've had discussions across my electorate of Forde with a variety of businesses and other organisations. I know that there are members in this place who have very significant agricultural communities, like the member for Barker, who spoke previously on the impact on his workforce in the agricultural sector. I've seen the impact on the workforce at the Teys abattoir in Beenleigh, with the issues of the borders being closed and not being able to access migrant workers to fill job vacancies at the largest employer in my electorate. I've had discussions with many businesses who have, say, put in place or been building a new factory, had a new production line that needed to be commissioned and haven't been able to get the appropriate technicians into the country to properly commission and test the production lines to get those up and running. I know from speaking to those businesses the frustration that has gone with that.

The necessity to have closed the borders in the first place to limit the risk and spread of COVID-19 is also critically important. I know that that has created issues for skilled workers, international students and even Australian residents wanting to come back home to Australia. I saw the difficulty of that with family members who were seeking to get back to Australia.

We recognise the importance of international education to our economy, and, with Griffith University just outside of my electorate, next door in the electorate of Rankin, I know the importance of international students to our university sector. It's not just the revenue they generate for the universities but also the places they fill in our workforce while they're here. Talking to many of our cafes and restaurants, I know the struggles they have had getting staff during this period of border closures.

As we look across the economy and start to open up, I know that starting to see people being able to come back into Australia, particularly our international students, lifts the confidence of our business community and the community more generally. As I said already on the importance of skilled workers, I know many of my manufacturing businesses are struggling to find Australians. I know several businesses that have given people in their employ significant pay rises to ensure that they keep those employees they've got because of the inability to source other skilled workers and the competition there is for those skilled tradespeople in our economy.

So the opening of our international borders is critically important, but we must always review that—as we have seen in the last couple of days now with this new variant of coronavirus—in the context of ensuring we maintain as much as possible our public health to prevent a continued outbreak. (Time expired)

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