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

I was denied the opportunity to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 earlier today, so I thought I'd use this opportunity to make a couple of brief remarks. In that debate earlier today, I heard the minister say that the CDC bill was needed as a response to the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic. That surprised me because we haven't really learnt the lessons from the pandemic because we've never had a royal commission. We've never had a proper inquiry into what happened during COVID despite all of the businesses that were shut and ultimately lost. There were people who lost their jobs and who were traumatised. We never had a proper investigation despite the fact that the Labor Party, when in opposition, chaired an inquiry recommending that we have a royal commission after the end of the pandemic. We still have not had one. So we haven't been able to learn the proper lessons from COVID.

I noted in the bill today that there was not even a mention of the issue of gain-of-function research. We know now—we know for sure now—that the coronavirus pandemic, this tragic event, happened because of a leak from a Wuhan lab where scientists were conducting so-called gain-of-function research. They were intentionally inflating the virality of a disease, and it unfortunately tragically escaped. I think people don't realise that those Wuhan scientists were trained in those techniques by the CSIRO. In this country, we have conducted at least 14 gain-of-function scientific research papers in the last 10 years. Still, to this day, we don't know what they did. The CSIRO and the department of health refuse to provide the details of what research was done. This is incredibly risky research. We know that now for sure. Why aren't we providing proper regulation and oversight of that research if we're serious about avoiding another pandemic.