Morrison urging 'first movers' to push coronavirus inquiry

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will marshall a group of leaders known as the "first movers" to ramp up pressure on the World Health Assembly for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.

Mr Morrison now has the support of the United Kingdom and the United States, which has backed down on its focus on an unproven theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, and will push G20 leaders to lobby China to accept independent inspectors.

The "first movers" group includes Australia, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Israel, Czech Republic, Greece and Singapore, which are the countries regarded as having most successfully managed the coronavirus outbreak. Mr Morrison met with the group on Thursday night and pressed the need for an independent review to be established when the WHA meets in less than 10 days.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The government will back a broad European Union motion calling for an inquiry into the lessons learned from the crisis and then steer it into two mechanisms.

The inquiry is likely to be run through a WHA committee chaired by the UK with independent oversight or a health regulation program at the WHA. Both would require China to comply, which is expected under the rules of membership of the World Health Organisation, but not enforced.

Mr Morrison said the WHA could accommodate the recommendations made by the Europeans as a good first step.

"But you can't let the trail go cold," he said on Friday. "And I think Australia and the United States and the United Kingdom and countries all around the world would like to know what happened, because we don't want to see it happen again."

The United States has now walked back from suggestions that it had "enormous evidence" the virus came from a Wuhan laboratory. The broadly accepted view in the international intelligence and scientific community is that it emerged from a wildlife wet market.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age this week revealed there were rising suspicions within the Australian government and intelligence services that the US embassy in Canberra had leaked a western government dossier to News Corp Australia that tied the virus to a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The research contained no intelligence and was made up of publicly available material, including news reports. It was then used as evidence on the News Corp-owned Fox News channel in the United States.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly claimed he had substantial evidence to back up the theory, before backtracking on Thursday, stating he was seeking clarity and arguing that it could have come "from somewhere in the vicinity of the Wuhan lab".

Firm intelligence on the coronavirus lab theory would help bolster US claims of a cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party, shift diplomatic sentiment and put global relations with China on an increasingly hostile trajectory.

Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd said the Trump administration and News Corp were hampering global efforts to get to the bottom of how the coronavirus virus originated and spread.

"It is imperative that intelligence agencies and the media resist the sort of politicisation that resulted in the American, British and Australian public being tricked into one of this century’s biggest foreign policy blunders, the Iraq War," he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Former PM Kevin Rudd. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

"Trump and [Rupert] Murdoch may want to convince us they’re muscling up to a security threat, but they’re actually working against our interests by playing into the hands of the Chinese propaganda apparatus by a premature, dramatic over-claim on the lab leak thesis, which the intelligence professionals do not support.

Mr Rudd has previously called for a royal commission into News Corp Australia and accused it of undermining his government and former Labor leader Bill Shorten.