Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it's time we had a look at the facts. Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has admitted that people dying with COVID are being counted as people dying from COVID, particularly those in aged care and palliative care. He said: 'Anyone who is a confirmed case who dies is classified amongst coronavirus deaths. So it doesn't have to be definitely from coronavirus and in some instances in aged care there would have been some residents who were already receiving palliative care who became infected with coronavirus.' So it's not definite about whether or not they died with or from coronavirus. I have to say that, on seeing the video, I was quite shocked by this, because I would have thought governments would have a duty of care to properly disclose the number of deaths from COVID. Why are people already in palliative care being counted as COVID deaths?

More to the point, why isn't the Victorian Labor government telling the truth? It's a total abuse of power to curtail people's liberties without proper disclosure. Are those opposite going to apologise to the minister for the slurs and the pile-on in this chamber—in particular, for implying that these deaths were avoidable when, in some cases, it appears that they weren't? Instead of asking Minister Colbeck to resign, why don't they demand that the Premier of Victoria resign? He was the one who failed to contain community transmission. He was the one who didn't have enough contact tracers, unlike New South Wales, which was much better prepared. The Andrews Labor government failed to have enough contact tracers. Even worse, he was the one who pulled staff from St Basil's with only a day's notice, leaving the federal government to come in and clean up the mess. Wouldn't you make sure you had appropriate staffing in place before leaving these residents to fend for themselves?

Wouldn't you get the residents into hospitals so they could be cared for? The whole point of the lockdown in March was so that state governments could get their health systems up to speed to deal with COVID-19. Can someone tell me: are some state governments—in particular, Victoria and Queensland—using the police force and not the health system to deal with COVID? You can't help the weak by tearing down the strong. You don't lock down the economy indefinitely without an exit plan. The state premiers need to lay out an exit plan. The fact is, there have been minimal cases of COVID in all states except Victoria.

We're not getting much information on this, and I know those opposite us have been attacking Minister Colbeck for not having information to hand. I've chasing up information for the last five months now on the number of people dying from suicide, depression, homelessness and things like that. Most of that information comes from state governments, and a lot of it hasn't been forthcoming. I find it very frustrating every day to listen to these press conferences by state premiers rattling off numbers to do with COVID, but they seem to ignore every other health impact and every other impact on society that are also going on. It's about time state premiers start to look at the overall picture and not just look at COVID. In my view, some of this is to try to divert attention from what I'd have to say is mismanagement of the health system, particularly in Queensland.

I'll quote you some numbers on Queensland. There are now 2,774 patients waiting longer than is safe for surgery. I should add that a lot of those patients were waiting pre COVID, because the Labor Party in Queensland has destroyed our health system. The queue of Queenslanders who are forced to wait longer than the clinically recommended time for surgery is now 20 times longer than it was before the pandemic. The Rural Doctors Association of Australia came out two weeks ago and said that the border closures were creating a second healthcare crisis. That didn't turn out to be an understatement, did it? We've now seen the death of a baby, thanks to Annastacia Palaszczuk's confusing border laws that led to a delay in a mother and baby getting adequate medical attention. I've seen the Queensland Labor Party do some pretty low things over the years, like introducing poker machines and closing over 30 maternity wards in the regions, and I've seen record waiting lists for surgery, ambulance ramping and record crime rates, but I don't think I've seen anything—as callous as what Annastacia Palaszczuk has done— (Time expired)