Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister outline to the House the importance of the Morrison government's plans to grow our economy while protecting Australia from the health effects of coronavirus?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the member knows, despite the impact of COVID-19 on Australia—which has been significant—Australia has fared better than most of the developed countries in the world not just on a health basis but also on an economic basis. That has been because of the efforts of Australians and the efforts of so many around this country to achieve those outcomes. But it has been principally based around getting the balance right between the health and the economic issues, to ensure that we have always been seeking to save lives and to save livelihoods and get an appropriate assessment of mitigating the risk on both of those, in balance, to ensure we minimise the impact on Australia. The suppression strategy that has been this country's strategy, endorsed by national cabinet and by our own cabinet, from the outset of this outbreak, gets that balance between the two—understanding that we need to live with the virus and that we need to contain community transmission and ensure that we continue to live in an open society with our economy as open as possible.

Australians understood the necessity of the measures that were taken throughout March and April because they understood that, at the early stages of this outbreak, we needed to get in place the protections and the supports that were needed to protect against community transmission of the virus in the future. They were also supported with the single largest income support package delivered by a federal government in Australia's history. That was understood. The suppression strategy was based on getting international borders and quarantine arrangements in place to ensure that we were boosting health system preparedness with PPE, respirators, testing kits and all the other things that were necessary to ensure that, should an outbreak of the scale we were seeing at that time, particularly in Europe, hit Australia, our system would be able to deal with it. Those protections were put in place across our health system with the strong support and cooperation of the states and territories.

Testing and tracing regimes were put in place, and Australia was leading the world on testing capabilities during those phases. We still retain a very high level of testing. Our industrial tracing, particularly in New South Wales, has been an absolute saviour. COVID-safe behaviour right across the community, with social distancing in workplaces and containing hotspots, is the suppression strategy. But where those things have failed, as they have in Victoria, we have seen significant community outbreak and the most extensive restrictions that any Australian has ever had to live with in this country, including during wartime, and that is of great regret. Our goal should be to reopen Australia again right across the country to live with this virus.