Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. What action is the Albanese Labor government taking to protect Australians and to support the quarantine of passengers that have been affected by the hantavirus outbreak?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Solomon. I know how proud he is of his beautiful community in the Top End in the Northern Territory, but I also know how particularly proud he is of the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre that has been headquartered in Darwin for almost a quarter of a century. Most recently, he's talked with pride about their deployment of a field hospital to east Katherine to help that community during the recent floods—just one example of almost 25 years of service from those terrific personnel. We'll be relying on their services to help deal with the hantavirus outbreak as well.

Hantavirus is a very, very rare virus for humans, and even rarer still is the transmission from human to human. But, where it does happen, we know it can be a very serious, even deadly, disease. There has, as I think all members of the House understand, been an outbreak of this virus on a cruise ship, Hondius, in the Northern Hemisphere. There have been five Australians—four Australian citizens and one permanent resident—as well as a New Zealander impacted by that outbreak, as passengers on the cruise ship. Yesterday, I reported that there had been eight reported cases of this, from cruise ship passengers, and three deaths. Very sadly, overnight that number has increased and there has been a report of a French national being hospitalised after returning to France and being currently in a critical condition.

Now, those five Australians and that New Zealander are in the process of being repatriated to Australia overnight. They were flown from Tenerife to the Netherlands. They are in good health. They are being kept informed about the arrangements that we are putting in place, and Foreign Affairs is in the process of finalising a flight to repatriate them to Australia.

Our government has a very clear view that quarantine arrangements for people arriving in Australia are a national responsibility—not something to be left, potentially, to different state governments putting in place different arrangements across state borders. So these travellers will be subject to arrangements that have been determined by our government.

Hantavirus, over the last 24 hours, has been listed as a human disease under the Biosecurity Act, which means it can now be subject to quarantine orders that will be made. These passengers will be flown into RAAF Base Pearce, north-east of Perth, and they will be immediately transferred to the national resilience centre or quarantine centre at Bullsbrook, which is effectively next door and will be staffed by staff from the NCCTRC deployed from Darwin. They will be quarantined there for three weeks, which is the strongest quarantine arrangement by any government that is receiving repatriated passengers from this cruise ship. After those three weeks, we'll be taking further advice from public health officials.