Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to make a contribution to this urgency debate. To start with, I just want to put on the record clearly, as I think Senator Keneally and others have done, that the constitutional requirement for the federal government to oversee quarantine is clear. It's a Commonwealth government responsibility to oversee human quarantine. I think that anyone writing the history of this pandemic with perfect 2020 hindsight is going to see that this was one of the clear failures of this government: not immediately taking action and putting in place across-the-board rules in each state and territory to safeguard quarantine in the nation.

If we look at the Halton report, perhaps quite contrary to popular opinion, the incidence of travellers returning and having a positive rate was 0.66 per cent in the two weeks to 30 August 2020. And the rate was as low as 0.3, based on 22 diagnoses of COVID-19 for in excess of 6½ thousand international travellers. We know that one case is capable of effecting community transmission and beginning an exponential growth in the rate of contracting the virus. But I think that when the history is written it's going to be very clear that the Commonwealth had an opportunity—it saw the Ruby Princess and the Victorian experience, and a similar, but smaller, experience in South Australia—where, if there had been one set of rules in the states and territories across the nation in respect of how we were going to treat this quarantine issue then there would have been less failure in repatriating people quickly and effectively.

In my home state of South Australia it's a very popular political decision to cease taking any more international travellers until we get our situation firmly under control once again. I know from speaking to many people in my street and in my neighbourhood that it's very popular. They say: 'Oh, we shouldn't bring them back. We should be very hard on them. Why are they over there anyway?' They're over there because that's what Australians do. I gave my daughter a 21st birthday present which was an around-the-world ticket. It took her four years to come home! Fortunately, there was no pandemic in that time but, had there been a pandemic, I would have been moving heaven, earth and everything else to get her home as quickly as possible. I really feel for the people who are stranded overseas in dire circumstances. The other day I read the story of a woman who'd lost her job because of the infection rate in London. She's now couch surfing and desperately trying to get home. It's true: we could bring them home. As Senator Rice said, it's not the lack of planes and seats but the lack of a coordinated approach to quarantine. The ad hoc nature of it and the implications of devolving the responsibility to the states have set us back a hundred years, in my view. Human quarantine is, simply, a Commonwealth responsibility. This government should have done better.

At 13 July 2015 we had 637 asylum seekers detained in Nauru RPC. I don't think many Australians would realise the cost of running that RPC in 2015. The figure—from the department—to 30 April 2015 was $350,419,000. To look after 500 people this government was prepared to spend—when you add in the operational costs, the staff costs and the capital costs—nearly half a billion dollars. We have what appears to be a fairly successful operation at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, where people come in. Early Sunday morning as I drove over to Canberra I heard a woman ring that ABC program, whatever it is—Macca's Australia All Overand say: 'I'm so relieved to be here, and all my cohort are so relieved to be here. And we're so thankful to be in the Northern Territory in a fairly open environment, rather than in a closed, air-conditioned inner-city hotel.' Most of us in this chamber spend far too much time in hotel rooms. I could not imagine being put in an air-conditioned room with no window and no balcony for 14 days, not allowed out for anything, basically. It would be extremely tough on your mental health—tough on all sorts of things.

The government had an opportunity to take control and a constitutional obligation to take control. The Ruby Princess was one area where it failed. As I've said, when the history of this is written it's going to be classified as at least an abrogation of the constitutional position of the federal government. I know that politics are being played around each state and territory. COVID incumbency is a very powerful thing; we've seen that over a couple of elections now. I know that the Premier of Western Australia has been the hardest of all in instituting strong border protection. In WA they faced a High Court challenge and won. Basically, it's not going to change in a hurry. But we've got to think of these 37,000 Australians who probably are becoming increasingly desperate.

Australia is a travelling nation. When we get back to having a million Australians overseas at any one point in a year, perhaps we'll need to have a bit of foresight and say, 'If there is a problem, what are we going to do?' Is it just going to be ad hoc? Are we going to allow it just to stumble and bumble along? Clearly, the Constitution written by our founding fathers gave the Commonwealth human quarantine as an obligation, and I think it's very clear that this Scott Morrison government—the Hon. Scott Morrison—has failed Australians in that respect. Contrast this with natural disasters like Cyclone Tracy in Darwin. The place was evacuated in three or four days. They threw everything at it, set a record for passengers on planes. I was working at Darwin airport in those days and saw it firsthand. The government saw Australians in need and did something immediately. If they'd spent one-tenth of what they spent on 500 or 600 IMAs—irregular maritime arrivals—then this problem would have gone away. But that's not the case. We're now looking at people not getting back to their families for Christmas. I think it's a crying shame that the federal government, which has done a lot of good work in this area—I can't be critical of the government on JobKeeper and that sort of thing—has, on the matter of human quarantine, abrogated or failed in its responsibility. That is to Scott Morrison's enduring shame. The history will be written that it was an abrogation of their responsibility, if not a downright failure to meet their responsibility.