Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

There is no doubt that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia was unprecedented, and our response followed a very uniquely Australian path, striving all the time to try to get the balance right between our health and economic objectives. There's no denying that Australia was one of the best-performing countries in the world throughout the pandemic when it came to saving people's lives and their livelihoods. But, with the power of hindsight, we do have the opportunity to explore how we could have done things better and certainly how we could do things better in the future if we are faced with a similar challenge again, and I think we should all be open to learning from the experience of the past. If there is another pandemic, we must make sure that the things we did well we do again and the things that we perhaps didn't do so well we don't do again. So it makes sense to review the decisions that were made very quickly and with a great deal of haste and in the pressure of the immediate situation that we were faced with to protect Australians at the time.

However, any inquiry must have the appropriate power to take evidence from all levels of government, not just the Commonwealth, given the extraordinary influence, power and involvement of the states and territories in Australia's COVID-19 pandemic response. It must look at all factors that impacted on decisions throughout the pandemic by all people, because we cannot forget the confronting situation that we were faced with at the time. It was unprecedented and, to be perfectly honest, it was frightening. What we were seeing back in 2020, before a vaccine, was a very different COVID situation to the situation that we see today. Countries like Italy and elsewhere were confronted with situations reminiscent of wartime. We sat in National Security Committee meetings confronted by possible situations where Australia might have to set up morgues next to a public hospitals and where intensive care units might be completely overwhelmed. That was the experience of other countries at the time and it was something that we were determined to avoid in Australia.

It's fair to say that in such unprecedented circumstances you don't get every decision right. We had to make quick and decisive decisions to protect Australians' lives and livelihoods. But Australia's management of the pandemic allowed us to avoid the death rates that so many other countries had to face. The former coalition government, I believe, acted swiftly during the pandemic to ensure our health systems had the capacity to protect Australians. It's believed that over 40,000 lives were saved by that quick response. Our loss of life from COVID was amongst the lowest in the world, and Australia led the world in COVID-19 ICU survival rates.

We ensured our preparedness early on in the pandemic by increasing ICU and ventilator capacity. Combined with the latest treatments, medical research and expert advice from the Communicable Diseases Network Australia and the AHPPC, this helped our frontline healthcare workers, doctors and nurses, who worked tirelessly through that time, to save the lives of so many Australians. Importantly, our response was always informed by the best medical advice. We worked tirelessly to make sure that this advice was used despite the fact that it was quite scant. We worked with the Australian people to ensure transparency with the modelling and advice so that they understood the basis upon which we made decisions. We made all health experts available to the COVID inquiry whenever they were required to appear and we established national cabinet in the early days to make sure that frontline communications were had with everybody who was being impacted and had decisions to make. This was in contrast to the mishandling we saw by so many other countries around the world, where their systems saw chaos as they responded to the pandemic, with fatality rates that were significant higher than in Australia.

But while our focus was primarily on health response, we also focused on the economic side of the pandemic and retained our AAA credit rating by supporting hundreds of thousands of businesses through JobKeeper. We also managed to put in place some reforming healthcare initiatives like telehealth. We now see a telehealth system in Australia that is supporting Australians with an innovative approach to how they get their health care, which is one of the benefits of being able to work during the pandemic.

But we also recognise that older Australians were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and that's why so much of our focus during the pandemic was to support older Australians, particularly those in residential aged care. On that basis, we believe there should be an appropriate inquiry that considers all factors into the decision-making and looks at all levels of government, considering the important roles played by the states and territories.