Page 1381 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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The opposition made it perfectly clear that we would not support that. Initially there were no exceptions to the taking away of the right to apply for compensation. There is now an exception, which was probably put in the bill because I raised the issue of the Chief Health Officer having the power to commandeer. Perhaps the government wanted to quieten the opposition and thought that if that were done it would satisfy our concerns. It does not satisfy our concerns. It goes some way to ameliorating our concerns, but it does not satisfy them.
The explanatory statement accompanying this bill seeks to justify the amendment based on the government’s assessment that the range and scope of claims that an eligible person may make could be beyond the scope of the territory’s financial resources. This, of course, is very serious stuff. The explanatory statement claims that any attempt to legislate to limit the range and scope of potential claims could test the territory’s resources severely. But I go back to my concern: this is a classic case of legislation on the run, and legislation on the run is always fraught with risk.
It started with amendments that the minister wanted to force through during the last sitting. I am pleased that the opposition resisted that move and that we are here today. What this boils down to is the taking away of the rights of ACT taxpayers, ACT workers and ACT businesspeople to apply—and I emphasise “apply”—for compensation. It emerged during the briefings only yesterday that part of the problem is that there is no administrative process that deals with compensation under the health emergencies act—an act which has been in force since 1997.
When this issue first arose, members of the opposition were told that for a while the government thought it could deal with this administratively; then it became apparent that it was too difficult to do that. It came as a great surprise to me yesterday, when I asked whether or not there were already guidelines, to be told that, despite the bird flu, the swine flu, SARS and MERS—over the past 10 or so years we have been threatened with previous pandemics and wide-scale epidemics—this government had done nothing to ensure that its public health emergency legislation was fit for purpose.
It may have been that, even if the government had done things when we were confronted with bird flu, swine flu, SARS and MERS, we would have had to come back here today, in the course of this pandemic, to make adjustments, but this government, for the past decade, when confronted with the prospects of pandemics, has been asleep at the wheel. There has been a complete lack of preparedness for health emergencies, and it flies in the face of the urgings of a former health minister—the Hon. Tony Abbott, in the early 2000s—that the nation should be well prepared for such emergencies. We have a national stockpile, which the ACT drew down on during the smoke emergency associated with the fires, simply because the commonwealth and the health ministers in the early part of this century decided that pandemics were a risk and that we needed to have a stockpile of equipment.
That stockpile of equipment would not have been enough if we had been confronted with a COVID crisis such as we saw in Italy, Spain, the United States, Brazil or Peru. We have been lucky—and the reasons for that are a discussion for another day—but there has been no development of guidelines for an administrative process because, presumably, no-one thought about it, and when they did think about it they decided it
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