Varun Ghosh (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There has been an effort here today to politicise an IV fluid shortage, and there's been a lot of heated rhetoric in this chamber about it. I want to take some of the temperature out of it and explain what the government is doing about it—the process and response. I also want to explain how that process demonstrates transparency and accountability and why that's important in a healthcare context and in the context of global supply chains.

A moment ago, Senator Colbeck said that there wasn't a global supply shortage. That is simply incorrect. There have been global shortages and supply issues that have affected Australia's position. There has been an unexpected increase in demand in Australia, and there have been manufacturing constraints here and overseas that are contributing to shortages. That's not something that the Labor Party or the government has come up with; that's the TGA in correspondence and in conversation with the sponsors of IV fluids in Australia and around the world. These fluids are important to our healthcare system, and that is why it's so important that this issue not be politicised and used to try to drum up alarm in the community. It needs to be approached in a problem-solving manner, which is what this government is doing.

The TGA has been working to mitigate these supply issues, but the Minister for Health and Aged Care and his colleagues around the country, the state ministers for health, have also been meeting and working to resolve the issues. There has been a response group created, and that response group will continue to meet on a weekly basis—or more frequently, as required—to deal with these supply issues and to fix the problems. There are immediate actions that this group has taken. The first relates to data and transparency—sharing data across jurisdictions on usage and supply and ensuring that producers and suppliers of IV fluids in Australia are providing data on their current supply and production forecasts. That is being done to better understand the severity of the shortage and to manage it in order to get the fluids to where they're needed most acutely. The second relates to distribution and logistics. In global supply chains, and in a country like Australia, it is important that there is a coordinated national approach to distribution across those supply chains and within Australia itself. Coordination and partnership are also important, and that's why we have all the state health ministers and the Commonwealth minister working together on this. Clinical guidance and communication are the final step, agreeing that there be consistent messaging across all jurisdictions to support appropriate usage while supply remains constrained. That is in quite stark contrast to the alarmism we've heard in this chamber today and the alarmism we've heard all week.

The reason I outline that process and take the time to go through the steps that are being taken and the extent of the coordination is to draw a contrast between the way this is being managed by this government, and the accountability and transparency it is demonstrating, and the approach of our friends opposite during the prime ministership of Scott Morrison. Scott Morrison was also, as we all know now, the secret minister for health. It's impossible to be accountable when you're a secret minister, because people don't know that you are exercising those powers. When Justice Bell conducted her inquiry into this particular affair, this act of constitutional vandalism, she said that Scott Morrison would have been able to take over from the health minister in a matter of minutes and that responsibility for that secrecy should be sheeted home to the Prime Minister. It's a little bit difficult to take those opposite seriously on those issues when, in their most recent opportunity to govern, they showed a complete lack of transparency and accountability.

I also want to talk also about coordination and my home state of Western Australia, because there's another contrast that is very stark: the manner in which Mark McGowan communicated during the pandemic. He used clear messaging so that people were clearly aware of the issues facing the community and could deal with them. He did so in a problem-solving manner, not in an alarmist manner—in a manner that sought cooperation to deal with the issues at hand, rather than make political points and try to embarrass a government that's trying to solve a problem with global origins. That contrasts very starkly with the lack of national leadership from those on the other side during the COVID pandemic.

There are three things we can say about this. It's a global problem. We're on the job to fix it. We are being transparent about how we're fixing it, and we are being accountable and coordinated in that response. That is something that cannot be said for those opposite.