James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Undoubtedly one of the most important and significant decisions this government made at the onset of this pandemic was the decision to regulate the international border—something that hasn't been done to the extent which it has in the last nine months in the history of our Federation. We have seen what has happened in countries around the world that didn't or couldn't put that kind of regulation in place. We are very lucky that we are an island continent nation. It is obviously much easier in a country like ours to put restrictions in place on our borders than it is in countries that have complicated land borders. But certainly it was still a very significant decision of the government, and I might say that it was undoubtedly a decision in cooperation through the national cabinet process that the Prime Minister established—one that had at the time and still has to this day the support of both Labor and Liberal governments across the state and territory jurisdictions. That was vitally important, because there is no way in the world you can put in place a regulation of our border without the Commonwealth government working hand in glove with the state and territory governments.

More importantly, to the erroneous point of the previous speaker, far from us not taking responsibility when it comes to this, we could have done the exact opposite of what we have done and said, 'We won't take any responsibility for initiating a cooperative approach to securing our border.' We could have easily said, 'At the end of the day we won't put any restrictions in place on people coming back into this country.' We could have said to the New South Wales government: 'We are responsible for the Sydney international airport. It's Commonwealth land and Commonwealth jurisdiction. We won't restrict who comes back into the country.' We could undertake our responsibilities when it comes to Customs border protection et cetera, but after that we could have said to the New South Wales government: 'You're on your own; there you go! These people are leaving the terminal, and you do what you will with them as they walk out, with their suitcases, completely unregulated.' That's what we could have done. Of course, we would never do that because that would have been completely ludicrous. It would have been outside of the spirit of our Federation. In quite the reverse, we recognised that the state and territory jurisdictions with the Commonwealth would have to work together to put in place the quarantine mechanisms and procedures that have now been in place since the end of March.

It's very important that we worked with the states on this, because, of course, the states run the health systems. When we were regulating the return of Australians into the country from a health point of view, there was no way in the world we could have done that without working with the states and territories. And that meant, of course, discussing, negotiating and agreeing with them on the quantity of people that could be brought back into the various jurisdictions around this country of ours in a manageable way that wouldn't put their systems, particularly their health systems, under a pressure that couldn't be borne.

We know, of course, that the greatest prevalence of this insidious virus has been in returning international travellers. There have been some notable exceptions, but by and large we are one of the great success stories across the planet in managing our border and more generally managing the spread of this virus within our community. Returning international travellers are the greatest risk that's posed, and we have ensured that, rather than having arguments with state jurisdictions about the number of people they believe they can handle in their various border checkpoints they share with us, we have come to agreement with them. That is the bottleneck in this process. All the other points are largely irrelevant, because in no jurisdiction do we have a situation where a state or territory government is saying, 'We'd love to take more internationally returning Australians but the Commonwealth won't facilitate it.' That is not happening anywhere—quite the reverse. We are agreeing with state and territory jurisdictions that we will not put more pressure than they have said they can bear on the capacities that they have created to manage quarantine.

On the concept of sending people to far-flung, remote destinations to quarantine: no health expert would ever say, 'Let's take people with potential life-threatening diseases and have them completely dislocated with the health infrastructure needed to care for them and keep them alive if, in the worst-case scenario, they are in the position where they are in quarantine and need to be urgently taken to significant health capability to look after them.' It is patently in the capital cities where we're undertaking this with the state and territories. We've got the support of state Labor jurisdictions as much as state Liberal jurisdictions. This is petty political pointscoring.

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