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

Congratulations to both our Prime Minister and Prime Minister Lee of Singapore for advancing the bubble between our two countries. We already have a successful pilot with New Zealand. It is time to do more than just one pilot: we need to be doing multiple pilots with island economies that have high-quality health systems and have COVID under control. There is no reason this shouldn't be done in parallel rather than one nation at a time. There were six million Australians travelling between our two countries in 2019. It is very important that we get this started again. We need a common pass—a digital health pass or IATA equivalent—so that health records can be verified and we can satisfy the requirements of countries that people are entering, whether it is visiting friends and relatives, skill visas, international students, or partnerships and prospective spouse visas. People have not seen each other for years and we need to get this started in a safe way. Pre-departure quarantine is vital. Alcolizer, a Perth based firm that is based also in my electorate, is doing incredible work in advancing both serology and antigen detection, and ensuring high specificity so we can be confident that a negative test result is a true negative. The technology is with us way better than it was last year. While we could have had these discussions about a bubble 12 months ago, it is important at this point to have multiple discussions about opening up these paths so Australia can do business with Asia again.