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

I want to make it very clear that One Nation wholeheartedly endorses the saving of lives. We also want to make it perfectly clear that One Nation is about data-based, evidence-driven policy. We don't see that, and we haven't seen it in the last 18 months.

Senator Birmingham rightly pointed out that, when COVID arrived in this country, there was a lot of uncertainty. We all accepted that. I stood in this place, in this chair, on Monday 23 March 2020, and said we acknowledged the uncertainty. We'd seen tens of thousands of people dying in China, France, Italy, Spain. We knew there was uncertainty, therefore, we would wave it all through. We waved JobSeeker through; then we waved JobKeeper through. We did that. What we've seen is state governments on rampant, capricious lockdowns for political purposes, because they don't know what they're doing.

I want to highlight Taiwan. I raised Taiwan on Monday 23 March 2020. I pointed to Taiwan and said it had a fabulous testing, tracing and quarantining process. They don't lockdown everyone; they lock down the sick and the vulnerable to protect the sick and the vulnerable. Up until a few months ago, Taiwan, which has a population roughly the same as ours—24 million, not our 25 million—on a tiny island, close to China, and which had an earlier ingress of the virus, had lost seven lives. The significant thing is not only the health of their people but that their economy bubbled along without any interruption. Since then, they've had a major breakdown in quarantine and they've lost hundreds of lives, but still fewer than Australia. They've recovered very quickly. They had a quick blip, and then it went back down again. Taiwan is managing the virus; the virus is managing Australia.

The federal government is abandoning competitive federalism and now introducing, or reinforcing—it's already here—competitive welfarism. States are acting capriciously, sometimes for electoral advantage prior to an election, as was shown in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. As Mr Barilaro has admitted, they don't know what they're doing in New South Wales. We've had accusations all over the country that Premier Dan Andrews doesn't know what he's doing. Why is the federal government continuing to just spend money and let these premiers behave irresponsibly?