Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support this referral because we shouldn't be signing an international treaty with the World Health Organization; we should be getting out of the World Health Organization because of their negligent handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It surprises me that very few people have actually raised in this debate the record of the World Health Organization over the past few years. There's a lot of emotion now in light of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and what have you, but people have forgotten the initial stages of the pandemic and the mistakes—the gross errors of judgement—that the World Health Organization presided over. It's absolutely ridiculous that they haven't—and no-one has—been held to account for those errors and mistakes, which probably cost hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, their lives. In fact, the head of the WHO is still the same person as at the start of the pandemic, even though at the start of the pandemic—we've all forgotten now—the WHO were saying there was nothing to see here; there was no problem.

On 14 January 2020, we were starting to learn about this thing called coronavirus, or COVID-19. Governments, including the Australian government at the time, were considering border restrictions against travel to and from China. At that very moment, when this was quite topical and governments were having to make serious decisions about protecting their own citizens, the WHO tweeted out:

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.

That's what they said. There was nothing to see here. There was no airborne transmission, no human-to-human transmission. 'You don't need to close your borders.' In fact, they doubled down on that as, in the weeks to follow, we were discussing a border closure to China. The Australian government was one of the first countries in the world to do that. I think it was almost that decision alone that prevented a wider COVID spread at that time. We made that decision on 29 January 2020, just two weeks after that tweet, but, as late as 3 February 2020, there was a news article, 'WHO chief urges countries not to close borders to foreigners from China'. How does this organisation have any credibility? There are people coming in here and saying: 'We've got to listen to the science. We've got to listen to the WHO; they know it all.' If we'd listened to the WHO in January and February 2020, this country would have had a massive COVID outbreak, because we still would have had flights coming to and from Wuhan. We would have been in the same boat as almost every country in the world. We were very lucky that, for whatever reason, COVID wasn't circulating in a widespread manner here in January and February 2020. It was probably because we didn't go to the military games in Wuhan the year before, in late 2019—Australia and New Zealand were two of the major countries that didn't go. We got lucky there, but we would have been very unlucky if we had listened to the WHO.

For those saying that somehow the WHO is sacrosanct and this oracle of science that must never be disagreed with, can you please explain to me whether or not you would have followed the WHO advice in February 2020? Did you agree with the Australian government's very tough and critical decision to close our borders to China at the time? If you did agree with that decision, you were going directly against the advice of the WHO at that time. You can't hold both positions. You can't say the WHO is infallible but at the same time agree and think that we made the right decisions about COVID there.

Their advice goes on, of course. Later on, in March 2020, the next month, CNN reported, 'WHO stands by recommendation to not wear masks if you are not sick or not caring for someone who is sick'. Remember that? Hardly anyone remembers now; it's gone in the memory hole, but for months in early 2020, right up until late 2020, the WHO were saying: 'No need for masks. Don't wear masks. They don't do anything.' As it turns out, they were probably right the first time. Later on, the WHO were saying we all had to wear masks and we had to force people to do it. This also shows that there's no such thing as 'the science'. Science evolves. Science changes all the time, including in response to something as severe as a pandemic. It's ridiculous to say that somehow an international treaty by an unelected group of health officials should be the gold standard and should effectively run the response to any kind of pandemic.

At first the WHO weren't in favour of lockdowns or border closures, as per most of the health advice. We did have communicable disease plans in this country and many others, and those plans almost invariably said not to lock down a society in the face of an airborne transmissible disease, but we went and did it. Originally the WHO said we shouldn't, and then we did. Then the WHO said we should and we should lock down harder and longer and all the time.

Again, what happened to the science here? These last few years have been a complete failure for the scientific community. They did not stick to their original plans. They got spooked by the panic of TikTok videos from China with people falling over in the street. We don't know where those videos came from or how they happened. It never happened anywhere else during the coronavirus pandemic, but we got spooked and the scientists got spooked. We all got panicked. I got scared. Everybody got scared. We were all spooked by it, so the science went out the window, and we all just responded with panic and fear. That's what happened. Allowing a treaty to entrench decision-making in a small group of people who, just like every other human being, are subject to potential paranoia and fear is a recipe for more errors during a pandemic.

What we need during a response to any kind of crisis, like a pandemic, is the flexibility and the ability of different countries to do different things, and then we can see what works and what doesn't work. Thank God for the good sense, bravery and courage of the Swedes over the last few years because they did chart a different path under huge pressure, under massive pressure. They were called murderers, pandemic spreaders and variant creators, but they have come out trumps. The Swedish experiment has clearly worked better than almost any other country in the world. They have pretty much the lowest excess deaths over the last few years of any country in the world—lower than ours. Even though we were lucky that we closed borders and didn't get COVID, we ended up three years later with a higher level of excess deaths than Sweden.

Again, there are those who are saying they support the science. When I learned science at school, I thought the idea was that we'd have a hypothesis, we'd experiment, we'd look at what happens in the real world and then we'd choose the particular experiment or particular course of action which delivers the best outcomes. Clearly, over the last few years the approach of Sweden has delivered much superior outcomes to those of almost every country in the world. Again, if we entrench the decision-making and power in this group, a particular group of unelected officials who seem completely unaccountable, that will potentially remove the ability to have that level of experimentation and effectively kill science. There won't be science; there will just be one particular hypothesis, and you won't be able to compare it to or contrast it against other approaches, which was a good thing. Likewise, in the United States different states were doing different things. Again, clearly, those states that didn't lock down as severely have ended up with much, much better human outcomes, much better health outcomes and better economic outcomes as well.

Before I go, I want to make sure there is some mention of perhaps the greatest failing, the almost criminal failing, of the World Health Organization in the last few years, and that is their gross mismanagement of the investigation into the origins of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic. There was a lot of controversy at the time about where this had come from. There was a lab in this place called Wuhan that was experimenting on coronaviruses, and then a coronavirus pandemic happened in Wuhan. It seemed reasonable to suggest that perhaps this laboratory that was experimenting on coronaviruses in bats may have played some role. But, of course, anyone who suggested that the lab leak theory had any kind of merit was immediately described, as Senator Shoebridge did just then, as a 'cooker' or 'conspiracy theorist' or some other rubbish.

In fact, 27 scientists wrote a letter that was published in the Lancet journal, a very respected journal—well, until now, it should be a respected journal. These 27 scientists all wrote a letter in March 2020 claiming that anyone who did support or posit the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theorist. That's what the letter said, that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory. In that letter in the Lancet journal, as there is in all articles in medical journals, there was a declaration of interests. The 27 authors said, 'We declare no competing interests.' That's what the scientists said. That letter was incredibly influential in giving cover to the Chinese Communist Party and suppressing any sensible discussion on whether or not a mistake or otherwise from the Chinese Communist Party played a role. It later came out—the letter published in March 2020, and they declared no competing interests—in a headline from the Daily Mail in September 2021 that 26 of the 27 Lancet scientists who trashed the theory that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab have links to Wuhan researchers. We have a senator here today coming in and calling everybody a conspiracy theorist, and we had scientists doing the same three years. It turns out those scientists were directly conflicted and lied about their conflicts of interest. They lied about it in an otherwise respected medical journal. Where's the accountability here? Why doesn't that get mentioned at all? Why are you running a protection racket for scientists who if they're not engaging in criminal activity it should bloody well be a crime to do something like that because it absolutely costs lives doing stuff like that.

What is worse than this though, and that's scandal enough, is how the WHO fits in here. One of those 27 scientists who signed it was a guy called Peter Daszak. Peter Daszak was the head of an organisation called EcoHealth Alliance, registered in New York. EcoHealth Alliance had funded coronavirus research in bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WHO selected Peter Daszak to play an influential role, to be one of the scientists, on the inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. How the hell did that happen? The World Health Organization that we're a member of and we're apparently going to sign a treaty with—where's the accountability? Why aren't we asking questions about this? We fund these guys. We send millions of dollars to the WHO.

The Australian government specifically asked WHO to do an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. We paid a big price for that in terms of China's unreasonable and illegal trade actions in response to that reasonable request. And then the WHO undermined the government of Australia's position by appointing somebody who had funded work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to look into whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology had started the coronavirus. That happened, and we're just sitting back and taking it. Don't we have any self-respect? This is the way they're treating us. We're giving them millions of dollars, and they get hundreds of millions of dollars from the Chinese government, and they seem to completely whitewash any kind of link to China or whether this came from there. They're not held to account. The same people are in the same jobs.

That's why I said at the start of this, and it might seem dramatic, that surely we should leave this organisation if this is their record and if these are their actions and this is their complete unaccountability here. They have shown complete almost intransigence in seeking to fix any of the errors that they have made, any of the gross errors of judgement that they have made, if not criminally negligent activity, with regard to the inquiry they operated. Why would we still be involved with them?

I think we should have a body that coordinates on pandemics and health responses. I certainly don't think we need to sign massive treaties or anything with them, but yes we should have a body where people can come together and discuss these issues. There are obviously cross-border implications when a pandemic occurs. However, the WHO is just completely discredited. It's totally stuffed up the coronavirus. And if there is not going to be a complete flush out of the people involved in these stuff-ups then we should leave WHO and form some other body. Let's create a new one. We can take our money, along with other like-minded countries, and set up a different body with actual accountability, because where is the accountability?

This inquiry will at least give a degree of accountability to the WHO. Maybe we can get them into the inquiry and ask them: Where is our money spent? What's happening to it? Why did you get it so wrong? We could ask these questions. If the government are not going to support this small inquiry in this Senate into the WHO's gross errors of misjudgement in the last few years, what are they planning to do to hold them to account? Where is the accountability? Because any organisation that gets taxpayer funded money from people who work hard in this country every day should be held to account. It should be held to account to parliaments, to elected officials and to others. Even if they have done everything right, they should still be held to account.

I'd still support this inquiry even if they've done everything right because we should have an inquiry. There's been a major, major thing that's gone on in the world and the WHO have been central to it. But they clearly have not got everything right. They clearly made massive errors of judgement. Even if they've not been directly involved in a cover up of the Chinese government, they clearly should have known Peter Daszak was doing this stuff. It was clearly and publicly available. He'd spoken about his research on coronaviruses in bats in public fora. The WHO should have known, and yet they appointed a bloke who was irredeemably conflicted to hold the inquiry into the origins of coronavirus. We should not be funding the WHO. We should be getting out of this corrupt organisation and we certainly, at the very least, should be doing an investigation into them.