Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

And we would have all gone home quite some time ago if Senator Sterle were really in charge of the timing of these things. But it's a fantastic show.

Just to make my friend Senator Rennick happy, my point, of course, is that times have changed. It's no longer the preserve of people handing out little roneoed notes distributed from some garage somewhere in the League of Rights headquarters or wherever. Anything can be said on social media. We see deepfake material being sent out. We see assertions being made which sound true but are in fact not true. Things are generated overseas in countries that don't have the best interests of Australians or Australia at heart, in antidemocratic countries, in countries with which we don't share values—adversaries, in fact. Meme factories are generating what I understand are called bots, which share the material on and share the material on—material that is completely untrue. But, if you follow the line from that material back to the antisemitic, nasty conspiracy theory stuff that was being shared by the League of Rights crowd and others, it's a pretty straight line.

And what is it that it's our responsibility in this place to do? It is to tell the truth, to support the science, to make sure that governments and this place act with transparency, to do it with confidence and to not be distracted by the efforts of some—not just on the crossbench but within the opposition parties here—who seek to take the utterly rational questions, apprehensions and fears that ordinary Australians of course have when there is an event like a global pandemic. There's a pretty close relationship between pandemic denialism, assertions about vaccines, assertions about the availability of information, and climate denialism, quite frankly. It is all in the same continuum of political activity. I know that on the other side many good people—I wouldn't vote for them in a pink fit, but there are many good people—are doing their best to stand up against this kind of conduct. I'm just saying that now is the time to be firm and resolute. Don't be worried about your preselections. Don't be worried about the hard Right. Don't be worried about the thuggery. Assert what is in the public interest and what is in the national interest.

The truth here is that the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects all of this data, mortality statistics and all the related data in Australia, and there are regular publications of that data. Provisional mortality reports are published monthly and every second month, as a way of updating the data in the most transparent way possible. Deaths in Australia are updated annually, and excess mortality reports are published twice-yearly.

Now, any person, any researcher, has access to that data. The trick, of course, with data is you've got to have the skills, you've got to have the academic background, you've got to have the research capacity to be able to interpret it intelligently, to analyse it properly and to report on it in a way that is true and ends up being truthful. And that is one of the problems here. You can take any bit of data and produce the kind of material that is being generated by some of those on the other side of this argument.

It's published online. It is available to every Australian. It's used by researchers, government departments and agencies like the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and it's reported in reputable publications, by actual academic journals that have standards—where people require doctorates not out of Corn Flakes packets but from reputable universities—and they provide analysis that should guide public policy making. Where there are problems, they should be transparent. But that's what should guide public policy making.

In their analysis, the ABS have compared the number of deaths which have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic to the number of deaths expected based on historical trends and adjusted population changes. It includes deaths from all causes, not only those related to COVID-19. While death rates and causes of death are key indicators of the health status of a population, it's important to remember, of course, that behind every death sits a personal tragedy. Behind that sits, very often, misery for a family, and they should not be the subject of political manipulation and grandstanding and nasty—