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senate vote 2023-08-07#11
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2023-12-29 10:34:26
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Title
Matters of Urgency — Covid-19: Pandemic Response Inquiry- Matters of Urgency - Covid-19 - Pandemic Response Inquiry
Description
<p class="speaker">Andrew McLachlan</p><p>I inform the Senate that the President has received the following letter, dated 7 August, from Senator Babet:</p>-
- The same number of senators voted for and against a [motion](https://www.openaustralia.org.au/senate/?id=2023-08-07.195.2) introduced by Victorian Senator [Ralph Babet](https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/senate/victoria/ralph_babet) (United Australia Party), which means it failed.
- ### Motion text
- > *That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:*
- >
- > *"It's been more than two years since some Labor MP's called for a Royal Commission into Australia's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It's been 16 months since Labor Senator Katy Gallagher backed a Royal Commission into Australia's pandemic response. It's been over a year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised the Australian people a Royal Commission or a similar inquiry into Australia's response to the COVID pandemic. He said an inquiry would be established 'as soon as practicable'."*
- >
- > *The Labor Government must honour their promises and establish a Royal Commission into the pandemic response immediately."*
<p class="italic">Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "that, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:</p><p class="italic">"It's been more than two years since some Labor MP's called for a Royal Commission into Australia's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It's been 16 months since Labor Senator Katy Gallagher backed a Royal Commission into Australia's pandemic response. It's been over a year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised the Australian people a Royal Commission or a similar inquiry into Australia's response to the COVID pandemic. He said an inquiry would be established 'as soon as practicable'."</p><p class="italic">The Labor Government must honour their promises and establish a Royal Commission into the pandemic response immediately."</p><p>Is the proposal supported?</p><p class="italic"> <i>More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—</i></p><p>With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.</p> <p class="speaker">Ralph Babet</p><p>I move:</p><p class="italic">That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:</p><p class="italic">"It's been more than two years since some Labor MP's called for a Royal Commission into Australia's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It's been 16 months since Labor Senator Katy Gallagher backed a Royal Commission into Australia's pandemic response. It's been over a year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised the Australian people a Royal Commission or a similar inquiry into Australia's response to the COVID pandemic. He said an inquiry would be established 'as soon as practicable'."</p><p class="italic">The Labor Government must honour their promises and establish a Royal Commission into the pandemic response immediately."</p><p>It's been almost a year since the Prime Minister, Mr Albanese, promised to establish a royal commission into our nation's pandemic response. Where is our royal commission? I know things move slowly in this place, but the Prime Minister promised this in August last year. He said a royal commission or something equivalent would be set up 'as soon as practicable'. When might 'as soon as practicable' be, Prime Minister? How long are we going to have to wait?</p><p>It's been 18 months since Labor minister Katy Gallagher backed a royal commission into the pandemic response. Minister Gallagher told the <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i> last year she was firmly of the view that a royal commission was the right thing to do. That's what she said, and I agree. Most Australians agree. So where is it? It was also Minister Gallagher who last year said that we need to know:</p><p class="italic">Who was advising, what they were advising, whether the government took that advice at critical parts of the pandemic is all unclear because we haven't been given access to that information—</p><p>and—</p><p class="italic">We think the government's response has been characterised by a failure to be prepared, a failure to take responsibility, and then a failure to get it right.</p><p>Minister Gallagher was previously the chair of a COVID-19 committee which recommended that we have a royal commission. So, whilst in opposition, the minister was a supporter of a royal commission, but now it seems like the urgency has evaporated. Why, Minister? Why has it evaporated? The Australian people need answers. We need the power of a royal commission to compel witnesses and for the production of documents. We need the truth. We need to hold those in power to account. We need to learn from all the mistakes made—and, my God, there were some mistakes made—and never to repeat them.</p><p>The World Health Organization declared the pandemic over back in May. Now is as good a time as any to have this commission. The chief health officers, the state Premiers are retiring, they're walking away, they're exiting their positions in quick succession, I think. We must not let them get away with what they did during the pandemic—the human rights abuses, the weaponisation of fear, the lockdowns, the closing of borders and obviously the inhumane vaccine mandates. Unexplained excess mortality is the elephant in the room. Cancer, diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular related deaths—they all spiked. I have previously attempted to create a committee to investigate this, but it was voted down by almost every single senator in this place. What a shame that was.</p><p>We purchased 318 million doses of vaccine at a cost of around $10 billion and around 68 million doses have been administered. That is approximately 250 million doses wasted, flushed down the drain, to the tune of $8 billion. Most Australians have caught COVID anyway. The vaccines do not work. We spent hundreds of billions on the COVID pandemic response measures and all we have to show for it is out-of-control inflation, excessive government debt and a guarantee of high taxes for the next generation. My home state of Victoria was the most locked down state in the world. Victorians like me will never forget these inhumane and ineffective measures for the rest of our lives. We will never forget.</p><p>We call on the Labor government to honour their promise to establish a royal commission into the pandemic response immediately. They previously said it should happen. They said it was the right thing to do. They promised it 'as soon as practicable'. Let's give people answers. Establish a royal commission now. Let's make sure that this never happens again. Let's protect our people from gross mismanagement. <i>(Time expired)</i></p> <p class="speaker">Anne Ruston</p><p>There is no doubt that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia was unprecedented, and our response followed a very uniquely Australian path, striving all the time to try to get the balance right between our health and economic objectives. There's no denying that Australia was one of the best-performing countries in the world throughout the pandemic when it came to saving people's lives and their livelihoods. But, with the power of hindsight, we do have the opportunity to explore how we could have done things better and certainly how we could do things better in the future if we are faced with a similar challenge again, and I think we should all be open to learning from the experience of the past. If there is another pandemic, we must make sure that the things we did well we do again and the things that we perhaps didn't do so well we don't do again. So it makes sense to review the decisions that were made very quickly and with a great deal of haste and in the pressure of the immediate situation that we were faced with to protect Australians at the time.</p><p>However, any inquiry must have the appropriate power to take evidence from all levels of government, not just the Commonwealth, given the extraordinary influence, power and involvement of the states and territories in Australia's COVID-19 pandemic response. It must look at all factors that impacted on decisions throughout the pandemic by all people, because we cannot forget the confronting situation that we were faced with at the time. It was unprecedented and, to be perfectly honest, it was frightening. What we were seeing back in 2020, before a vaccine, was a very different COVID situation to the situation that we see today. Countries like Italy and elsewhere were confronted with situations reminiscent of wartime. We sat in National Security Committee meetings confronted by possible situations where Australia might have to set up morgues next to a public hospitals and where intensive care units might be completely overwhelmed. That was the experience of other countries at the time and it was something that we were determined to avoid in Australia.</p><p>It's fair to say that in such unprecedented circumstances you don't get every decision right. We had to make quick and decisive decisions to protect Australians' lives and livelihoods. But Australia's management of the pandemic allowed us to avoid the death rates that so many other countries had to face. The former coalition government, I believe, acted swiftly during the pandemic to ensure our health systems had the capacity to protect Australians. It's believed that over 40,000 lives were saved by that quick response. Our loss of life from COVID was amongst the lowest in the world, and Australia led the world in COVID-19 ICU survival rates.</p><p>We ensured our preparedness early on in the pandemic by increasing ICU and ventilator capacity. Combined with the latest treatments, medical research and expert advice from the Communicable Diseases Network Australia and the AHPPC, this helped our frontline healthcare workers, doctors and nurses, who worked tirelessly through that time, to save the lives of so many Australians. Importantly, our response was always informed by the best medical advice. We worked tirelessly to make sure that this advice was used despite the fact that it was quite scant. We worked with the Australian people to ensure transparency with the modelling and advice so that they understood the basis upon which we made decisions. We made all health experts available to the COVID inquiry whenever they were required to appear and we established national cabinet in the early days to make sure that frontline communications were had with everybody who was being impacted and had decisions to make. This was in contrast to the mishandling we saw by so many other countries around the world, where their systems saw chaos as they responded to the pandemic, with fatality rates that were significant higher than in Australia.</p><p>But while our focus was primarily on health response, we also focused on the economic side of the pandemic and retained our AAA credit rating by supporting hundreds of thousands of businesses through JobKeeper. We also managed to put in place some reforming healthcare initiatives like telehealth. We now see a telehealth system in Australia that is supporting Australians with an innovative approach to how they get their health care, which is one of the benefits of being able to work during the pandemic.</p><p>But we also recognise that older Australians were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and that's why so much of our focus during the pandemic was to support older Australians, particularly those in residential aged care. On that basis, we believe there should be an appropriate inquiry that considers all factors into the decision-making and looks at all levels of government, considering the important roles played by the states and territories.</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>-
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