Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Don't laugh! Please do not laugh! It truly was. It was recognised by the Hopkins Centre as being the second-best in the world. There was no manual at the time that we could have pulled down from the shelf which said, 'This is what you do when you have a global pandemic,' because we hadn't had one for a hundred years, and the last one occurred just after the First World War.

Of course, conditions have vastly changed since the guns fell silent to end the Great War—and no war is great, as we know. But, of course, 11 November 1918 was an historic day. After that, our soldiers started to come back and, yes, they brought the Spanish flu and the pandemic of the day home with them. It cost millions of people their lives right throughout the world. Guns and disease and trench fever and all the rest had cost so many people their lives. We as a nation have just down the road a war memorial which has 60,000 names on it from the First World War; 60,000 of our best and bravest of the time had gone to fight in Europe in that conflict. In the Second Boer War before it, from 1899 to 1902, disease cost the lives of many more Australians than did bullets. This is a fact.

What we have to absolutely do, on both a health front and an economic front, is make sure we are prepared if there is going to be another pandemic. But what we did at that time in the Morrison government was make sure we saved lives and protected lives but also saved jobs and livelihoods. It galls me every time I hear a Labor member getting out their talking points from the Labor dirt unit, saying 'a trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt'. It was nowhere near a trillion dollars. The ABC fact check has made that very clear—nowhere near. Every time a Labor member stands and says that, they should then go and apologise for it, because it's not true. It's not right. It's not correct. But what we did do—

Don't laugh. I'm being deadly serious. You're new members of parliament; I get that. You can sit there and smugly say: 'Well, we've got a 51-seat majority. We can say what we like.' But it wasn't funny at the time, when the chief health minister said to a small executive leadership team of government—and I was included in that—that we could potentially lose 60,000 Australian lives if we didn't do something within weeks, and we did. I pay tribute to the prime minister of the day; to health minister Greg Hunt, member for Flinders; and to Josh Frydenberg, the treasurer of the day and member for Kooyong, for what they did to protect people and to protect jobs.

I'll tell you what else Greg Hunt did, and never was I prouder in this place than that time. He made sure that our remote Aboriginal communities were protected but also our Pacific friends. I'm glad that the Pacific minister is at the table, because I think in his heart of hearts he would acknowledge too that we went out of our way to make sure that vaccines were available in the blue Pacific, and we did save a lot of lives. Could we have done more at the time on so many levels? Yes, of course, but we didn't know what we didn't know.

But we were very lucky, very fortunate, to have an outstanding public servant in Steven Kennedy, secretary of Treasury, who had by some miracle in his university days and his days of studying done a paper on disease preparedness. With the lessons that he learned from the research that he did all those years ago, he was able to help guide Prime Minister Morrison and the others who were around that table at the time to make sure that we endeavoured to put the best decisions forward in the national interest.

You had people being buried on Manhattan Island in New York in public graves, and you had morgues filled to overflowing in Italy, such that they were using churches to cram coffins in. And they are two good health systems, the United States of America and Italy. We didn't see any of that in Australia, but elsewhere in the world, in places where there were good health systems, COVID was running rampant, and we were able to save so many Australian lives and protect so many Australian businesses. I make no apologies for what we did at the time. Every time Labor steps up and says, 'We're in a situation of debt because of the Liberals'—and the Nationals too, by the way; we're in a coalition—

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