Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Coronavirus Economic Response Package (Jobkeeper Payments) Amendment Bill 2020. As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want Australians to stop being slaves and to start living freely. Let's look at some facts. Australia's COVID-19 death toll stands at over 650. Let's compare with Taiwan. Taiwan has a similar population, 24 million—compared with Australia's 25 million—but on a tiny island, with higher population density making virus transmission far easier. Taiwan is close to mainland China, the virus source. Taiwan imported the virus onto their shores earlier than Australia did. Taiwan has far more people moving to and from China. How many deaths have they suffered in Taiwan? Seven. Not 700, just seven. While we locked everyone up in quarantine, trashed our economy and racked up massive debt for younger generations, Taiwan is steaming ahead. Despite its large markets in Europe and America suffering economically due to the virus, Taiwan has hardly had a blip. Why?

How can that be? Several words—'data', 'plan', 'leadership', 'trust' and 'truth'. That's the secret to Taiwan and other countries similar to Taiwan; they're not the only ones. They acted quickly and closed their borders.

Following SARS in 2003, Taiwan established a central command centre for epidemics. By January 2020 the command centre was coordinating the government's response to the coronavirus. It quickly compiled a list of 100 action items, including border controls, school and work policies, public communication plans and resource assessments of hospitals. Taiwan's government introduced a travel ban on visitors from China, Hong Kong and Macau soon after the number of coronavirus cases began to rise in mainland China. Anticipating the high demand for masks in late January, the Taiwanese government started rationing the existing supply of masks. Taiwan then leveraged the strength of its manufacturing sector and invested approximately $6.8 million to create 60 new mask production lines. This increased Taiwan's daily mask production capacity from 1.8 million masks to eight million masks. This has been called Taiwan's 'mask miracle'. The proof is in the pudding.

Taiwan have had, as I said, seven COVID deaths, compared with Australia's 652, yet they were exposed to it earlier. They have technology for early detection. The Taiwanese government has also used data technology to help medical personnel identify and trace suspected patients and high-risk individuals. The Taiwanese government also provide support for those put under quarantine. Local village leaders, for example, will bring a bag of basic supplies like food or books to quarantined individuals. Taiwan didn't lock up everyone; they locked up the sick and the vulnerable. They said, 'That's the way democracies are handling quarantine during the coronavirus outbreak.' It's very different from authoritarian governments.

Compare Taiwan with mainland China. This is a case where democracies should leverage their data and technologies appropriately so they can triage people to the right place and follow up with appropriate care. We did not behave like a democracy. Taiwan's strategy was the opposite of ours. Taiwan isolated the sick and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with their work and social lives, and they've had one ninetieth of the deaths that Australia has had.

Taiwan focused on people's lives, remembering medium-term, long-term and immediate issues. People's health in Taiwan is No. 1, and, because of that, their economy has continued beating hard. So, as I said, the key ingredient is data. The Taiwanese had the data. They gathered the data—if they didn't have it, they went out and got it—and then they shared that data. They trusted their people. They developed a plan very quickly and they shared that plan with their people. Contrast that with our Prime Minister's six-month hibernation.

We still haven't seen a solid plan. We have been told lots of times what's happened, what has been happening and what has been done, but we aren't being told what will be done. The Taiwanese did tell people that. That's leadership. The Taiwanese leaders trusted the people with the data, with the facts and with the plan, and they shared the responsibility with business owners to manage their workplaces to keep people safe. Contrast that with Australia: severe lockdowns and severe punishments.

When we ran out of masks early on, our state and federal political leader said: 'Masks are not effective. Don't worry about it.' When we eventually built up a stockpile of masks, political leaders changed their tune and said that masks are essential. Which one do we trust? Which story? Trust is built on truth. There's no way around that. When leaders lack data, lack a plan, lack trust and don't give trust, they are eventually exposed, and that's what we're seeing now. The Prime Minister, the Victorian Premier and the Queensland Premier have been exposed and are being exposed not just on coronavirus but on the mess our country was in before February—before the virus arrived on our shores.

Think about the real issue here beyond coronavirus—the recovery. The Prime Minister and the premiers are focused on recovering back to February. They haven't got a clue how to do it, but that's the economic level they want to get back to. We should be focused instead on our economic strength when we were No. 1 in the world for gross domestic product per person, income per person. The coronavirus revealed—as we said early on, in March—our country's demise since 1944 and the loss of our manufacturing. We are now ranked with under-developed nations in the lack of sophistication of our manufacturing. Why? Because we've jacked up energy prices three times—they're triple what they were. We've replaced our independence with interdependency, which is really another word for dependency.

We've destroyed our economic resilience, our economic sovereignty and our productive capacity, thanks to the United Nations Lima Declaration that Labor signed in 1975 and the Liberals ratified the next year. We shipped our jobs to China. That shipping of jobs and that destruction of our productive capacity continued with the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration that Labor signed and the Liberal-Nationals implemented. Then the UN's 1996 Kyoto climate protocol that destroyed our electricity sector, and for which the Howard government stole farmers' rights to use the land that farmers had bought and owned. Then the UN's 2015 Paris Agreement that the Liberal-Nationals signed to accelerate the destruction of industry—manufacturing, agriculture, trade-exposed industries.

And then, as I said, we heard the Prime Minister's initial response to the coronavirus: six months hibernation—no plan, no data. Stories about what we have done rather than what we will do. Now we have calls for a plan to get back to the February level of performance—still no data, still no plan. After almost 80 years of pandering to foreign agreements, we are living with declining living standards and higher costs of living. Why not aim to be No. 1 in per capita income? Let's get down to the basics. That's where we were in the early years of our federation. But now, instead of having competitive federalism, we have competitive welfarism—thanks to Chairman Dan. Sloppiness in Victoria led to complete breakdown of the control of the virus there—