Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator McCarthy for her question, a similar question to the one she asked yesterday. As I outlined to the Senate yesterday, we do recognise that there is an ongoing role in the future for there to be centres of national resilience of a greater number and scale than we have had in the past.

Through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have successfully worked in partnership with the Northern Territory government, who I acknowledge, to utilise the Howard Springs facility and to significantly expand the Howard Springs facility to a 2,000-bed capacity. Alongside that, we are working with the Victorian government to ensure the establishment of a new Centre for National Resilience—and we will see the initial handover of beds at that facility to the Victorian government by the end of this year—and with the governments of Queensland and Western Australia for further facilities. These will all provide long-term resilience capability. In terms of the broader quarantine effort, states and territories have done a very strong job in working to ensure that we have quarantine capacities for the most extraordinary of circumstances that COVID-19 has presented.

In relation to the omicron variant, the government has made certain announcements to pause the next stage of reopening that we had indicated. We don't wish to see any step backwards from the safe reopening of Australia. The very high levels of vaccination that we have achieved as a country provide very strong protections. We use this pause to ensure that we can continue as we always have to get the best possible health advice to continue to keep Australians safe.