Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Pratt has drawn the short straw. She won't put her name on the list, but she will have to dutifully read out some talking points that have been prepared for her by some hapless staffers over there on the blue carpet in the ministerial wing. They've had to put together a defence. It's hardly a rousing defence of the health bureaucracy's record over the last few years, because no-one seems to be able to question it and put it back to them and ask, 'Why aren't we having an inquiry into this? Twenty thousand more people than we expected have died. Where is the inquiry into this issue? I hope Senator Pratt can enlighten us, because it seems like the white flag has been put up here on this. They are no longer defending the potential shortcomings and significant side effects of the vaccine rollout. But it's not enough to be silent now. It's time for questions and, ultimately, answers about what went wrong.

We also deserve to know, and the question should be asked: how have our health bureaucrats got things so wrong? We spent so much time in COVID—and I was guilty of this, early on—agreeing with and believing the advice of the health experts. We said that we would have to just listen to the advice. They were the experts who knew what they were doing, so we should do what they tell us. And we dutifully did that. It turns out that so much of their advice was completely, utterly and tragically wrong.

A report was released just in the last day about the excess deaths over the past few years in different countries. Despite all our border closures and largely being untouched by most of the worst COVID outbreaks, we have actually ended up with more excess deaths than Sweden—by some margin. I remember at the time all the health bureaucrats and experts were saying how terrible Sweden was. They were killing grandma and grandad! It was terrible!

In fact, we know that the official advice before coronavirus arrived about how to deal with an airborne pandemic did not call for lockdowns. All our official documents, including here in this country, by the health experts said that we shouldn't have lockdowns: you can't use lockdowns to control an airborne virus. It's not going to work. Despite all that, Sweden was about the only country in the Western world that actually complied with the initial advice on this. Everyone else became panicked and we locked people in their houses.

I still think about how we locked single mums up with two or three kids in an apartment in Western Sydney and told them they could only go outside for one hour. That's what did! We told them, 'You can only go outside for an hour.'

An honourable senator interjecting—

Yes, fresh air was the best thing you could do for them. They were struggling with screaming kids in a house, and we locked them inside for 23 hours a day and said we were protecting everyone. They also deserve this inquiry—although they did not suffer as much as those who've unfortunately died in the last couple of years—about what the hell went on and how did we get things so wrong.

What really frustrates me is the double standard that we see from our health experts. They seem to be engaging with something much more akin to behavioural science, or discredited behavioural economics, than they do with actual, real virology or pharmaceutical science. At estimates just a couple of months ago, Senator Rennick raised the case of two children, a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, who had died after receiving the vaccine. The head of the TGA at that time, Professor Skerritt, went to great lengths to say: 'Look, you can't draw conclusions from isolated cases. There are only a couple there. There could be other factors.' That is a perfectly reasonable point, may I add, from Professor Skerritt. That is true: a couple of cases is not enough to draw strong scientific conclusions—I still think there should be an investigation—but you can't draw the necessary conclusions.

But it seemed just a little unusual that Professor Skerritt would make such a conclusion on something like that, when I remember that every time a single child tragically died from coronavirus the health bureaucracy played it up like it was the worst thing ever. There's an article here in The Australian saying that Professor Skerritt at the time was grumpy and unloaded on people about downplaying COVID's effect on children, when one child—very tragically—died of the coronavirus. Yes, that is very concerning and should be investigated. But here we have a situation where Professor Skerritt used one case to scare people to get their children vaccinated but refused to use two cases to investigate the side-effects of the vaccine itself.

Perhaps one of the worst things we have done throughout this period is to force, or pressure people, to vaccinate their children when there was almost zero evidence of the scientific benefits of that. I can accept weighing up the risks of vaccinating older and vulnerable Australians, but children should have been left alone. The risks of COVID were always clearly low. They were lower than the flu. I'm not saying that COVID itself was less worse than the flu, but for children it was. The evidence was always clear, and we don't force or pressure people to vaccinate their children for the flu, but we did so here with an experimental vaccine that we knew didn't stop transmission. It wasn't going to save Grandma—it didn't save Grandma—yet we exposed our children to that risk anyway.

Again, we deserve that inquiry, because I would hope that we can get back to giving people broad-ranging advice on their health, while respecting their intelligence. One thing that has frustrated me the most over the last few years is the way our health bureaucracy all treated us like idiots. We were force-fed these scare tactics and propaganda, rather than just being given the advice and being treated like adults who can weigh up the risks and benefits of different medical treatments, because—I come back to where I started—every drug has a potential risk.

And I worry that the pharmaceutical industry here seems to constantly push the drug option on us, rather than the best health option for us. We could have told people to invest in their health, over the last few years—to exercise a bit more, eat a bit less, take some vitamin D. All of these things would have helped reduce the risk of coronavirus, as well as lot of other diseases. But, of course, what that health advice wouldn't have done was help the profits of pharmaceutical companies. It would not have done that. Most of all, if this inquiry ever does get up, if the government finally announces this inquiry—and I hope Senator Pratt can announce it right now—those pharmaceutical companies must be hauled in front of it to explain why they didn't provide more data and more evidence about the risks to people, and didn't put their profits above the 20,000 people in this country who have inexplicably lost their lives.