Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights gives all Australians the right to safe high-quality health care. Our national cabinet promised to protect the vulnerable from the COVID-19 pandemic. This promise has not been kept. Yesterday Sue Jennings, a constituent of Kooyong and co-founder with Amy Lewis of Cleaner Air Australia, contacted me to express her concern about the removal of masks from healthcare settings. There are no longer any legal requirements for healthcare workers to wear protective masks. All pandemic orders have now expired. Chronically ill, disabled and elderly Australians can avoid restaurants, shops and travel to protect themselves from COVID but they have no choice about accessing health care, where they are now at high risk of hospital acquired infections. If you go to hospital for something unrelated to COVID but you are infected with it while in hospital your risk of dying from it is one in 10. This is more than 50 times the community mortality rate for COVID. It's an unacceptable and unnecessary risk.

The COVID pandemic is not over. There are more than 400 Australians on ventilators with COVID today. Forty of them will die from it. On behalf of all vulnerable Australians, I ask the Albanese government to urgently review its public health measures in response and in regard to COVID-19.