Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the COVID-19 Response Commission of Inquiry Bill 2024. Firstly, I want to thank Senator Canavan for putting this bill together and Senator Ralph Babet for bringing it before the Senate today. I do support this bill and I want to outline my reasons, and it's certainly not for the reasons that Senator Ayres, in his atrocious contribution, laid out.

I'm rising and supporting this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's for those people that, throughout the pandemic, contacted me—and I'm sure they were contacting everyone here, particularly those in Western Australia—those people that couldn't make a funeral and those people that couldn't go and see a loved one in hospital. I dealt with hundreds of people that were dealing with those situations. I know of one person that was not able to go and sit beside the bed of someone that they cared for because they were from interstate and they couldn't get into Western Australia.

What we need is proper evidence. To date the Western Australian government has not revealed the medical advice that they were relying on. There were different decisions that were made across the country. We were seeing medical data here that prompted the federal government to make the decisions that it made, but then you would see different states and jurisdictions make completely different decisions with completely different advice. That sort of information should come out, and it's not about the conspiracy theories and the rubbish that Senator Ayres was talking about. This is about real people and the anxiety that was caused during that time, and many people are still living with it today.

I would say that probably 99 per cent of the population just want us to move on. When you go to the barbeques and you sit around the pub and say, 'Remember those COVID years?' people laugh about it and say, 'How crazy was it that we had to do all those things.' Most people have moved on; that is true. I think most people do just want us to move on, but we owe it to the next generation—it could be 10, 20 or 50 years time when we face a similar situation—that we have the evidence of what went right. A lot went right. We did a lot right as a country. I think we fared better than most countries in the world, so we should be recording that. We should be looking at what went right, but there were some things—there are some questions over whether the decisions made were entirely correct, and I think there are many instances where they weren't.

I will give you an example: in Western Australia, we had a vaccine mandate that applied essentially across the entire working population. Almost every occupation was in a category that required you to be vaccinated. There were people like farmers, for example, who were driving a tractor in the middle of a field on their own and who were in contact with nobody, who had to be vaccinated. There were people that didn't want to be vaccinated, and I believe that is their right, particularly when there was no evidence anywhere to say that the vaccine was going to reduce transmission. Their decision to not be vaccinated was simply just about themselves, because it wasn't about a community benefit. There was no community benefit to it because there was no evidence to show that it was reducing transmission, and, at that time, when the mandates were implemented in Western Australia, we had the omicron variant, which was a much less lethal and serious strain of the virus, so it wasn't clogging up our hospitals. It's not like there were a bunch of people that were getting sick that were clogging up our hospitals.

There was no evidence to show that it was required then, but decisions were made, and those decisions were made on the eve of an election. The Premier was riding extremely high in the polls, so there are criticisms or suggestions that the decisions were made on a political basis. The point that I'm making here is that we should get the proper evidence. We should get the proper evidence in an independent way, have public inquiries and have public hearings so that that evidence can be heard to check whether or not there was undue political influence over decisions that were made. We owe it to the next generation to support this. We owe it to the next generation to ensure that we have a proper inquiry with public hearings, a commission of inquiry. That is essential to get to the bottom of what was happening at that time.