QandA: Government ‘responsible’ for stranded Aussies, says Kristina Keneally

Monday night’s panellists on ABC’s QandA dealt with the problems hard border closures are causing for Australians at home and overseas.

Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally on Monday's QandA. Picture: ABC

Monday night’s panellists on ABC’s QandA dealt with the problems hard border closures are causing for Australians at home and overseas.

Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally said it is the commonwealth’s responsibility to bring the 25,000 stranded Australians home.

“The commonwealth at the beginning of this crisis brought people home from Wuhan, brought people home through Darwin and put them into quarantine facilities run by the commonwealth. It is the commonwealth’s fundamental responsibility to look after stranded Australians when they’re overseas,” Senator Keneally said.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack insisted the federal government was doing everything in its power to put “compassionate cases” at the front of the queue, including increasing the number of available rescue flights.

Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid said structured quarantine facilities, like Christmas Island, should be looked at as a long-term solution for border restrictions.

“As we know, it takes government an awful long time to do most things, but there is no doubt there is an opportunity for the government to do more, to expand quarantine, to do it in different ways, but it is absolutely imperative that the quarantine is strong and that we don’t let the virus escape,” Dr Khorshid said.

He said the AMA would like to see more mental health services provided to Australians stranded overseas.

However, Mr McCormack said it can be challenging for people overseas to gain access to mental health services.

“We have a number of websites but actually getting to them personally and individually, in whatever situation they find themselves, whatever country in the world they are, at the moment it’s a bit difficult to get that,” he said.

Mr McCormack said the federal government had allowed the premiers to determine how many international arrivals they could manage and maintain to limit community transmission.

He said NSW has “borne the brunt” of quarantine services since the second wave broke out in Melbourne.

Dr Khorshid said Australia has a clear national strategy to defeat the virus, but acknowledged it has not been communicated well to the public.

“The strategy is to suppress and eliminate the virus. Get our economy as normal as possible, and hope and pray for a vaccine quickly,” he said.

“And whilst none of our politicians are willing to say it, it is what we have been doing and these rules, which do seem oppressive at times, if you look at that lens, where it’s been effective, it works and has delivered the best health outcomes in the world and the smallest impact on our economy compared with most other countries.”

Dr Khorshid argued hard borders are not the only way of protecting states, but said they cannot be discarded just because they are inconvenient.

“We have to really look to co-operate, get some strong agreement between the states, and that means trusting in other arrangements and contact tracing,” he said.

“If one state does the wrong thing, the rest of the country gets let down. At the moment, I don’t see that trust there.”

Host Hamish Macdonald pressed Mr McCormack on whether he believed the Black Lives Matter protests in June were linked to Victoria’s second outbreak.

Mr McCormack said police resources had been used unjustly having to “attend and babysit a group of protesters who shouldn’t have been protesting in the first place”.

However, Dr Khorshid said he was unaware of any evidence the rally had brought about the outbreak, but he agreed congregating in large numbers “did not make sense” at the time.

Senator Keneally said she was “gobsmacked” the Deputy Prime Minister was trying to assert Victoria’s spike in case numbers was linked to the BLM protest, accusing Mr McCormack of “Trumpism”.

She then said the NSW Opal card database had done a better job at tracking coronavirus cases than the government’s COVIDSafe app.

“This COVIDSafe app was supposed to be our ticket to freedom, our way out,” Senator Keneally said.

“It hasn’t yet found one unique contact that wasn’t found by manual tracking and tracing.

“A lot of Australians are getting frustrated, angry, wanting to go and protest because there is no clear strategy or plan here in place.”

Entrepreneur Tania de Jong said the national cabinet had stopped working because it had failed to balance case numbers and deaths with costs and benefits and freedom and rights.

“There are so many other indicators that we need to be talking about,” she said.

“We need to balance it against the economic costs and the costs of all of our businesses being decimated, the lives and livelihoods and the mental health that is going to destroy us.”