Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I present the first interim report of the Select Committee on COVID-19, together with the Hansard record of proceedings, and I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

In the few minutes available to me this evening, I am pleased to be able to note that the Senate established this committee on 8 April to examine the government's health and economic response to the pandemic. With limited parliamentary sittings during the early stages of the crisis, the committee has been central to the democratic oversight of decisions with a profound impact on people's safety, welfare and economic survival. We have had 37 public hearings, accepted 463 written submissions and gathered hundreds of hours of evidence.

Firstly, I thank everyone who's made sacrifices to help their fellow Australians in a time of need, especially our health workforce, public servants and others who have worked together to keep us safe and keep services running. Thank you to the many organisations, private individuals and public servants who appeared before the committee and made submissions. Thank you, also, to my fellow committee members and the committee secretariat for their efforts to date.

In 2020, Australians came together and showed remarkable courage, patience and collective spirit. The fact that we avoided the terrible scenarios now playing out in some other countries is the result of this hard work. But we can't afford to be complacent. Despite faring better than many countries, we should remember that almost 28,000 Australians have contracted COVID-19 and 908 Australians have died. Three-quarters of all of these deaths have been in aged-care facilities. Around 39,000 Australians remain stranded overseas, and 8,000 of them are classified as vulnerable people. The economic impact of the pandemic has been severe, with 2.4 million people out of work or working fewer hours than they need, with unemployment forecast to remain above pre-pandemic levels for the next three years. For millions of Australians, 2020 has been the most difficult of years, and we should not underestimate the ongoing challenges that many of these Australians face and will continue to face as we recover from the pandemic.

This is an interim report of the committee. As chair, I felt it was important that we reported to the Senate at the end of this year. The report makes six recommendations and 24 interim findings. This report does find deficiencies in the government's preparation for and early response to the pandemic. On the health response, the short summary is: thank goodness for the states. It was the states that took the big, brave decisions at the right time and forced the hand of a federal government that was resisting pressure to take stronger action. Five areas stand out as the most significant shortcomings in the government's health response to date.

The first and most serious of these is the aged-care crisis. Six hundred and eighty-five residents in aged-care facilities funded and regulated by the Morrison government died from COVID-19, accounting for 75.4 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in Australia. The federal government didn't have a plan to protect aged-care residents. They ignored the royal commission's warnings in October 2019 in its report titled Neglect. They were too slow to act, and then, when disaster struck, tried to avoid accepting responsibility for keeping people safe. Their big announcement, the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre, didn't open until 25 July, after 294 cases of COVID-19 and 26 deaths in Victorian residential aged-care facilities.

The second is the Ruby Princessa mismanaged disembarkation back in March from a ship which caused the biggest outbreak in Australia. Six hundred and sixty-three passengers on the Ruby Princess ended up with COVID-19. The government's failure to observe its human quarantine responsibilities, despite public commitments that it was in charge, allowed these passengers to disembark, spreading the virus right across the country.

The third is the Prime Minister's failure to provide national leadership when we needed it the most. In March, as COVID-19 case numbers continued to grow, the Prime Minister downplayed the need for stricter social-distancing restrictions, undermined decisions by the states and territories to close schools, and made political attacks on Labor premiers over state borders. Without the strong advocacy for bolder measures displayed by state premiers—and particularly by New South Wales and Victoria—Australians' experience with the pandemic could have been very different.

The fourth is the government's expensive and ineffective COVIDSafe app. In April, the Prime Minister said that it would be like sunscreen and help us reopen, yet he failed to deliver on this announcement, with the app suffering performance issues and identifying just 17 unique contacts. And now it's headed for a revamp. I wonder how much that will cost.

The fifth is the failure to put in place a paid pandemic leave scheme when it was needed the most. With millions of Australians not having access to paid sick leave, there was always a big risk that people would go to work sick in order to pay the bills. Low-paid casualised essential workers were identified as being at high risk of spreading the virus due to their lack of paid sick leave very early in the pandemic. The ACTU raised this on 11 March, but this government didn't act for five months, and not before the Victorian aged-care outbreak was well established. It remains unclear as to why the government did nothing to address this huge transmission risk until 3 August—by which point we had already reported over 18,000 cases—other than that it didn't want to act and protect these workers.

On the government's economic response, the short summary is that they left too many people behind. They argued against a wage subsidy scheme and, when they did agree with one, they excluded over one million casuals from JobKeeper. They plundered the retirement savings of people hardest hit by the pandemic, through the poorly designed early access to super scheme, which for months into this pandemic was the largest source of stimulus across the economy. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.