Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025, Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (11:39): When Labor first took office in the term before this one, they came to power on the promise that they would be transparent and that there would be no secrets. 'Let the sunshine in,' they said, and the public believed them. The public took them at face value as to what they said they would do as far as accountability is concerned.

Yet, time and time again, we are being faced with the prospect that this government is more secretive than any before it. That is a shame. Provisions within this particular bill, the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025, create many concerns around transparency and freedom of information.

We've heard in recent weeks that Labor now wants to put a cost on FOIs. I know that, when I was a minister in many portfolios, I had staff dedicated to just answering FOI submissions—mainly put forward by Labor shadow ministers. That's fair enough.

We live in a democracy. Sometimes the request for information was just a try-on. More often than not, it was just political gameplay by Labor.

My staff and department—the Department of Transport, Infrastructure and Regional Development—answered those queries in good faith, yet we knew that sometimes it was absolutely just political posturing by Labor. Yet now Labor wants to put a cost on those requests. Some might well say that this is a tax on truth, and it probably is.

In October last year, the Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing—someone who, I have to say, is not forthcoming with giving information—alleged that a lack of transparency had driven a decline in trust. This is the same minister who, when another member of parliament writes to him, gets his chief of staff to respond. I do not think that is good enough.

I don't. I think that, if a member of parliament writes to a minister, their being from the other side of politics should not matter. The minister should have the decency to respond as a member of parliament to a member of parliament.

But that doesn't happen. I shouldn't know the name of the chief of staff of the minister for health, quite frankly. I'm not about to put his name in Hansard; I don't believe that staff should be hauled before the House of Representatives.

But I shouldn't be getting correspondence from the chief of staff; I should be getting it from the minister himself. Even if he just gives it a perfunctory glance and signs the bottom of the page, ministers should always read every bit of that correspondence—not just every line or every sentence but every word—but that doesn't happen with this particular minister.

Despite this clear recognition from the minister, this bill goes out of its way to stop information from being made public. That is indeed unfortunate, because it goes against the grain of what Labor said it would do when it came to office. That was to be more transparent, to be more accountable.

Yet the opposite is the case. While the government claims the CDC's advice will be published by default, the devil is in the detail. It tells a different story.

The director-general will have extraordinarily broad powers to withhold information. In this day and age, when the public is crying out for major parties and for the government of the day to be upfront and honest, the opposite is occurring. It's simply not good enough.

It's not. What we're seeing are vague and subjective terms that could be used to withhold almost any piece of information that the government finds to be an inconvenient truth. There are no clear appeal rights, and, again, this goes against the hallmarks of justice, the precepts of a fair go—all of those things that a democracy holds near and dear.

There's no guarantee that the public or indeed the parliament—the people's House, the House of Representatives—will ever see the light of day when it comes to finding out information. It is terrible. It's not transparency.

It's not accountability. It's not what Labor said it would do. And it is a shame because the public expect better.

The public deserve better, and they're not getting it. It's yet another attack on transparency and democracy from a government that wants to put accountability behind a paywall. I know the shadow Attorney-General has said this a number of times: it's a truth tax.

And it's in this day and age, particularly from this government which says it will hold everything to account, including itself—they're doing exactly the opposite. Labor member after Labor member comes in. They always have their carefully prepared notes, and they just read them like robots—probably AI driven.

But the people who put Labor there expect better, and they're not getting it. It's such a shame. Labor has had five years, almost, to make the case for this policy, prior to coming into government and since being in government.

They have not successfully done so. We, perhaps for that reason alone, oppose this legislation. We believe it can go to a Senate inquiry.

Labor can do what they like. They can. They have a 51 seat majority in this chamber.

I understand that. It's numbers. 'We'll get it through this place.' But a Senate inquiry is necessary to delve into precisely what the implications of this particular legislation could involve. On the broader question of disease control and being more prepared when—and hopefully it won't happen—another pandemic occurs, I have to say, the coalition's response to COVID-19 was first class.

It was considered by the Johns Hopkins institute— Honourable members interjecting— Mr McCORMACK: Don't laugh! Please do not laugh! It truly was.

It was recognised by the Hopkins Centre as being the second best in the world. There was no manual at the time that we could have pulled down from the shelf which said, 'This is what you do when you have a global pandemic,' because we hadn't had one for a hundred years, and the last one occurred just after the First World War. Of course, conditions have vastly changed since the guns fell silent to end the Great War, and no war is great, as we know.

But, of course, 11 November 1918 was an historic day. After that, our soldiers started to come back and, yes, they brought the Spanish flu and the pandemic of the day home with them. It cost millions of people their lives right throughout the world.

Guns and disease and trench fever and all the rest had cost so many people their lives. We as a nation have just down the road a war memorial which has 60,000 names on it from the First World War; 60,000 of our best and bravest of the time had gone to fight in Europe in that conflict. In the Second Boer War before it, from 1899 to 1902, disease cost the lives of many more Australians than did bullets.

This is a fact. What we have to absolutely do, on both a health front and an economic front, is make sure we are prepared if there is going to be another pandemic. What we did at that time in the Morrison government was make sure we saved lives and protected lives but also saved jobs and livelihoods.

It galls me every time I hear a Labor member getting out their talking points from the Labor dirt unit, saying 'a trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt'. It was nowhere near a trillion dollars. The ABC fact check has made that very clear—nowhere near.

Every time a Labor member stands and says that, they should then go and apologise for it, because it's not true. It's not right. It's not correct.

But what we did do— Mr Moncrieff interjecting— Mr McCORMACK: Don't laugh. I'm being deadly serious. You're new members of parliament; I get that.

You can sit there and smugly say: 'Well, we've got a 51-seat majority. We can say what we like.' But it wasn't funny at the time, when the chief health minister said to a small executive leadership team of government—and I was included in that—that we could potentially lose 60,000 Australian lives if we didn't do something within weeks, and we did. I pay tribute to the prime minister of the day; to health minister Greg Hunt, member for Flinders; and to Josh Frydenberg, the treasurer of the day and member for Kooyong, for what they did to protect people and to protect jobs.

I'll tell you what else Greg Hunt did, and never was I prouder in this place than that time. He made sure that our remote Aboriginal communities were protected and also our Pacific friends. I'm glad that the Pacific minister is at the table, because I think in his heart of hearts he would acknowledge too that we went out of our way to make sure that vaccines were available in the Blue Pacific, and we did save a lot of lives.

Could we have done more at the time on so many levels? Yes, of course, but we didn't know what we didn't know. But we were very lucky, very fortunate, to have an outstanding public servant in Steven Kennedy, secretary of Treasury, who had, by some miracle in his university days and his days of studying, done a paper on disease preparedness.

With the lessons that he learned from the research that he did all those years ago, he was able to help guide Prime Minister Morrison and the others who were around that table at the time to make sure that we endeavoured to put the best decisions forward in the national interest. You had people being buried on Manhattan Island in New York in public graves, and you had morgues filled to overflowing in Italy, such that they were using churches to cram coffins in.

And they are two good health systems, the United States of America and Italy. We didn't see any of that in Australia, but elsewhere in the world, in places where there were good health systems, COVID was running rampant, and we were able to save so many Australian lives and protect so many Australian businesses. I make no apologies for what we did at the time.

Every time Labor steps up and says, 'We're in a situation of debt because of the Liberals'—and the Nationals too, by the way; we're in a coalition— Mr Conroy: At the moment. Mr McCORMACK: See, you can hear it—just smug, just hubris. And it's not funny.

It's serious, and I'm being deadly serious, because it was a deadly time. We lost so many lives, and we mourn for those thousands of Australians who did lose their lives because of COVID. So disease preparedness is important, and that's why this legislation is important.

And it should be important enough for every Labor member. Mind you, if it were a union piece of legislation, they'd all be in here talking, and they should be talking about disease preparedness. They should be talking about these sorts of things for the sake of their electorates and for the sake of the country, because it's important.

Things such as this are important. This legislation should be rejected. It should be going to a Senate inquiry.

It's too important not to.