Coronavirus: Labor urges goverment to enact tighter restrictions

Finance Minister fires back at claims the government’s stepped approach to the coronavirus crisis is inadequate.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has hit back at criticism of the government’s decision to progressively implement tighter restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus, warning against “gratuitously shutting down businesses because we are under political pressure”.

However Senator Cormann acknowledged some states were more “justified” in breaking away from the national cabinet to push ahead with harsher shut down measures, as pressure mounts on the NSW and Victorian governments to introduce stage three restrictions.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles on Sunday called on the government “to get on top of the problem as quickly as possible” and bring forward any further restrictions it was considering, saying Australia cannot respond proportionately to an exponential growth of cases.

“Our view has always been that we need to be doing everything we can now,” he told Sky News.

“Whatever we’re thinking about doing a week, two weeks, three weeks from now, let’s do it today.

“This is a virus which spreads exponentially … you only need to look at what the numbers are today compared to what they were last Sunday to get a sense of this and every transmission that occurs, every extra person who gets this disease makes the problem from a public health point of view that much harder to deal with.”

.@David_Speers asks @MathiasCormann what Stage 3 restrictions will involve. pic.twitter.com/vWYCxXd35V

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) March 28, 2020

Senator Cormann said the national cabinet had been successful in working in a nationally coordinated fashion.

“It is also true that individual jurisdictions are a bit further down the curve in terms of the spread of this virus and therefore it is likely to be justified that individual jurisdictions will calibrate their responses accordingly,” he told the ABC’s Insiders program.

“Our health mission is to save lives by slowing down the spread of the virus, we won’t be able to stop the spread but we are committed to slowing the spread to ensure that our hospitals are in the best possible position to deal with a consistent, constant flow of patients rather than to be completely overwhelmed.

“We’re not going to start gratuitously shutting down businesses because we are under political pressure. In the end it is a war on two fronts and you know shutting the economy down when there is no advice to do so would also have health consequences as well as social and obviously economic consequences so we (have) got to continue to make sensible decisions here.”

.@David_Speers asks @MathiasCormann about what landlords of commercial premises can expect.

"If the business is no longer able to pay the rent, there is limited capacity to attract another tenant right now."#Auspol pic.twitter.com/ggrwSPWciP

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) March 28, 2020

Senator Cormann acknowledged there were “lots of different voices” offering response suggestions, but said the Morrison government was working with chief medical officers from around the country.

“If we were to shut the whole economy down, when would we open it again? And what would be the consequences on the way through? And let’s let’s say we shut it down to the point where nobody moves and indeed the virus completely stops. And then what? We reopen it and it starts spreading again?”” he said.

“These things might seem simple. They’re not that simple. In the end we don’t believe we can stop the spread, we do want to slow the spread.”

Mr Marles mentioned the gradual shutdown of Australia’s borders as action which should have been brought forward.

“We’re not trying to shape a human adversary here, we are dealing with a virus which spreads at a mathematical exponential rate and when you think about a graph like that, then the more you can do before the graph takes off, the more likely you are going to be in actually managing the problem,” he said.

“Whatever we’re thinking of doing a month from now let’s do it today, and then that’s got to be the principle.

“The border is a very good example of had we acted differently earlier on, then the scale of the problem we’re now trying to deal with would be entirely different and much smaller.”

He said Labor was “fundamentally there to try and support” Scott Morrison in dealing with “a really hard problem”.

He also urged the government to explain the reasons behind the strategy and guiding principles on which it was making decisions.

Mr Marles, who is also opposition defence spokesman, praised the role of Australian Defence Force personnel in the planning and engineering response, and said “the reassuring presence of the Australian uniform within our community” should be valued.

He also acknowledged the ADF’s role in helping to expand Australia’s domestic surgical mask production and in providing planning advice to different jurisdictions.

“The very presence, the reassuring presence of the Australian uniform within our community in the midst of a crisis has value,” Mr Marles said.

“We’ve seen that during the bushfires, we saw that in crises that the country has faced previously. I think that alone is going to make Australians feel better.”

“Having the defence out there loud and proud is I think a really important step forward and there are many many roles that defence can play.

On the longer term implications of COVID-19, Mr Marles said it would in time “rewrite the strategic landscape of the world and how this then impacts our national security going forward will be the next way in which we think about this”.