David Van (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise as a senator for Victoria, a state that I love and that is sadly now in a state of disaster—I don't mean just those who have lost lives in COVID-19. I give my condolences to the 438 families who have needlessly lost loved ones, and I pray the 3,600 active cases get well soon, like the 14,000-plus cases who have already recovered. I also pray for those people needlessly having their lives destroyed through the mishandling of the pandemic in my home state.

Every day I receive dozens of calls from small-business people. These people operate businesses in Victoria. These businesspeople are men and women, mothers and fathers, trying to make ends meet to feed and clothe their families. More often than not when I'm speaking to them, they're crying. They are desperate. Their businesses are about to go under. They have, to their credit, got through nearly six months of some of the strictest restrictions in the country, but now they are at the end of their tether. Their businesses survived stage 3, but they don't believe they will survive stage 4 restrictions.

Businesses and families have been failed by their state government—the Andrews Labor state government. There is clear evidence that there has been a failure of governance in hotel quarantine in Victoria. There was insufficient governance, regardless of who was hired to do the job, and governance is government's No. 1 task. It has been established beyond doubt that the ADF were offered, but were turned down. If you can't quarantine the virus away, you need very good contact tracing to contain it. Victoria's contact tracing has been described to me by one senior health official as 'catastrophic'. If we look at how New South Wales have handled the pandemic, it's clear to see that they are the gold standard and they have shown Victoria how to do it. But I'm yet to be convinced that the Andrews government has learnt this lesson.

If you can't contain COVID in quarantine or by using testing and tracing, you can only resort to draconian measures, and that is exactly what Andrews is doing. We've had three weeks of stage 4 so far, four weeks of wearing masks, six weeks of stage 3, and there are those hotspot suburbs which have been in lockdown now for over 10 weeks. While the drop in numbers this week is very, very welcome, Victorians have the right to ask: 'Is this working as it should?' Throughout all this, Dan Andrews has blamed Victorians, and he and his ministers have sought to avoid all accountability. He didn't even know which of his ministers was in charge of quarantine, but he sure knew who to blame. Shame, Premier, shame! His followers in the media were only too happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, even last week, his deputy commissioner of police said that, with 30,000 people required to isolate, only 42 fines have been issued. That is 0.14 per cent—hardly what anyone could call mass civil disobedience. Premier Andrews can't trust his health minister or her department to contain, trace and test, or quarantine. He turned to the department of jobs, of all things, to run quarantine. While he doesn't seem to acknowledge this, I'm sure this fact will be established very soon.

Andrews's response to this pandemic is just: 'Let's lock it down.' He's a one-trick pony. As he has no proper process to contain COVID, he continues to strongarm Victorian businesses to death. Premier Andrews, who hasn't let parliament sit for six months, now wants parliament to sit to hand him greater emergency powers. I'm not arguing that the powers might not be needed, but there doesn't need to be 12 months worth of powers. As opposition leader Michael O'Brien said today, 'Victorians elect a parliament, not a premier.' So we look to parliament in Victoria to make sure that those extraordinary powers—those unnecessary powers—are not given to Dan Andrews.