Senior Labor figure wants the party to call a COVID royal commission

A key Labor frontbencher is pushing the party to back a royal commission into Australia’s COVID-19 response after a parliamentary committee she chairs recommended the move to ensure the nation is prepared for future waves of the virus or new health crises.

The call for a royal commission was one of 19 recommendations in the final report of the Senate COVID-19 committee, dominated by non-government senators, which has been examining government decisions, health advice, economic impacts and community experience throughout the pandemic.

Senior Labor frontbencher Katy Gallagher wants her party to establish a royal commission into Australia’s pandemic response.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

A trio of philanthropic foundations have already teamed up to launch an independent expert examination of the pandemic response, in the face of government inaction on a comprehensive inquiry, as the Herald and The Age revealed on Monday.

Opposition finance spokeswoman and committee chair Katy Gallagher said there were some questions that would not be answered without a royal commission’s powers to compel witnesses and production of documents.

“Who was advising, what they were advising, whether the government took that advice at critical parts of the pandemic is all unclear because we haven’t been given access to that information,” she said.

“We think the government’s response has been characterised by a failure to be prepared, a failure to take responsibility, and then a failure to get it right.”

But Coalition senators James Paterson, the committee’s deputy chair, and Perin Davey did not endorse the recommendations, including the call for a royal commission. Nor is it formal Labor Party policy as it heads into an election.

Senate rules prevented Senator Gallagher from discussing the idea with her colleagues before the committee tabled its report but she now wants Labor’s leadership to back the proposal.

“I’m firmly of the view that it is the right thing to do, that we do need to look into some of this further, and we do need to be better prepared for future pandemics,” she said.

Last year, other Labor MPs also backed a pandemic royal commission, in principle.

The committee also called for the Therapeutic Goods Administration to be given greater powers to deal with misinformation about drugs, vaccines and treatments during public health campaigns or emergency responses.

Its report discusses the role of some Coalition MPs – including George Christensen and Gerard Rennick – in spreading misinformation, but the committee also heard from First Nations communities that had been sent flyers en masse from United Australia Party’s Clive Palmer denigrating vaccines. The TGA’s powers at the moment are in effect limited to meeting people and discussing concerns about any claims made.

Other recommendations call for more transparency over decisions made in the past two years, regular reporting on future preparedness, and for the government to stop spending money on its COVIDSafe application that was supposed to help contact tracers.

Senators Paterson and Davey said in a dissenting report they thought the 200 hours of evidence given by nearly 680 witnesses at committee hearings over 18 months “reflects a remarkably high degree of government co-operation with this committee”, contrary to claims of a lack of transparency.

“While this committee was initially established with bipartisan support and a genuine desire to investigate issues of concern during a rapidly evolving pandemic, the committee has regrettably been used [as] a vehicle in which Labor senators have pursued partisan attacks on the government,” they said.

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.