Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

These are interesting and troubling times. Many Australians are fearful of COVID-19 and what it might do to their health or the health of someone they love who is either older or immunocompromised. It means that measures like border closures have been at least superficially very popular, if we go by the polls. But there's a real problem with allowing mere popularity to drive policy because, as New Zealand, for instance, has shown us, mere hard border closures are not a long-term effective solution. Sure, while the hard lockdown is on it might reduce numbers a bit, but it cripples the economy without providing a long-term strategy for living with this virus, because that's what we have to learn to do. We can't eradicate it. That's not realistic. What we need is a serious plan for living with it.

While the Queensland Premier has ramped up border closures, chasing base political advantage around two months out from an election, she knows in her heart that it's just a matter of time before this strategy falls apart. No doubt she will time that for the day after the election. But the medical advice on how we need to learn to live with this virus is absolutely clear. There are three measures: high testing rates, quality tracing and outbreak containment where those outbreaks occur. It's uncontroversial medical advice and it's borne out by all of those jurisdictions that are managing the virus well. Nowhere does the medical advice say that we should declare places without COVID cases, like the ACT, to be hotspots for exclusion or inflexibly close borders to deny proper medical care to people in border communities—nowhere! And the very inflexibility of Queensland Labor merely compounds the problem.

Here's an example that LNP leader Deb Frecklington has been fighting hard for. Ms Jayne Brown, a woman of Caloundra, recently underwent major brain surgery in Sydney under the care of Professor Charlie Teo. She requested an exemption, with the support of her doctor, from hotel quarantine to instead quarantine in her home given that she was recovering from major brain surgery and in fragile health. She and her partner had a home COVIDSafe health plan, but she was told no. Footballers and their coaches get exemptions and celebrities get exemptions but not truly vulnerable Queenslanders.

Here's another example—a Ballina mother, pregnant with twins and needing urgent medical care, wasn't granted permission to cross the border to get that care. Instead, she was sent on a 16-hour journey to Sydney. It's just not on. That's especially so when Australian taxpayers, as a whole, overwhelmingly fund health care. It's not true to say that Queensland hospitals are for the use of Queenslanders only. In fact, to allow only Queenslanders to use them even in critical cases like these is nothing short of ugly. It's not the Queensland spirit at all.

A Lismore mother was not allowed to accompany her newborn to Brisbane for urgent medical care. For four anxious days she paced, waiting for her baby to be returned. With a newborn baby, even an hour apart can feel like torture. Could you imagine waiting four days while your child was sick? I could keep rattling off case after case of this kind of barbarism.

The inflexibility is harming Queensland's businesses, too. I went to bat recently for a Queensland farming business that also has operations and staff in New South Wales. Their highly skilled staff operate in both states. They're not easily replaced. Yet, when they sought an exemption for their workers to go to their North Queensland farm, they didn't even get the courtesy of a no. They couldn't get a decision at all, not even a return phone call from the decision-maker's office. The date of the application had well passed before they even got a response and even then it was only once their federal representatives had been called in.

At last, on Monday, there was finally some change in the policy. But it remains the case that the kinds of decisions that, for instance, take the WA government 24 hours take Queensland Labor over two weeks. I had a South-East Queensland film company tell me their terrible experience of comparing dealing with the Western Australian government and its border closures with the inflexibility and chaos of how Queensland Labor has approached it. The reality is, it just means the business goes elsewhere. Queenslanders pay for it. They might not feel it today, because of the assistance that's being implemented by the federal government, but make no mistake: it is killing our businesses. It is driving mental health to the edge and it is taking a brutal toll on already vulnerable Queenslanders, who need either compassionate exemptions or the economic lifeline of a job.

An open economy within our national borders and a mobile population able to take advantage of markets and services is what has underwritten Australia's prosperity. Sure, we have to make some adjustments for the difficulties of managing the virus, but at least let it be driven by the medical evidence, at least let the advice of those who know how to manage a virus be taken into account. The hypocritical way that those opposite feign concern for the mental health of individuals, for low-income people and for our vulnerable people is nauseating—in circumstances where these same people champion border closures that are fundamental in driving poor mental health and personal hardship.

Queensland's health response is built on a lie. It's built on the lie that we can eliminate the virus from Queensland. It's a quest that might earn short-term political support, because it has the illusion of offering the comfort everybody needs and the comfort that everybody wants in a complex world, but it can't be achieved. It isn't based on the advice of people with the expertise to understand how viruses like these operate. It's based on a lie that was, I think, articulated quite well by Jennifer Westacott from the Business Council of Australia recently. She pointed out that those opposite treat anything above zero as a serious policy failure. You can guarantee that that's going to get you an unbalanced policy response—only looking at the harm that is done in one sector and counting any numbers above zero as a serious failure, while closing our eyes to the harm done in other spheres and not paying attention to the harm to mental health or to the suicides that are going on because of this hardship. And this is a hardship that's happening because businesses are closing, because people can't plan out their economic future and because people cannot cope with the economic impact of these draconian measures. Gosh, it might be short-term populist politics, but it guarantees a flawed economic recovery and it turns Australia into a fragmented place, instead of the country banding together to confront one of the biggest policy challenges of our lifetimes.

Let's not forget this: while Queensland and the states more generally might bear primary responsibility for the health response, the economic responsibility is sheeted home to the federal government. The incentives are all in the wrong place. It means that we have a Queensland Labor government acting with reckless abandon for our economy—reckless abandon and a lack of balance in the way that we need to confront this challenge—because when it comes to the economic questions, they can just blame somebody else. Australians deserve better, and do you know what? Queenslanders are smarter than Premier Palaszczuk gives them credit for. Queenslanders can see through this shallow, populist strategy and they understand that there's more to this. They understand that they should listen to the experts, and that they are being fought for relentlessly by the LNP state team, by Deb Frecklington and Tim Mander, who will relentlessly fight for the kind of mature, measured policy that will get us through this difficult time.