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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-03-24 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:30): We are used to thinking about enemies as large things: as bombs, as missiles, as armies and as warplanes. The enemy that our world is confronting right now is two ten-thousandths of one millimetre in size; it is tiny. This virus, COVID-19, is causing a massive disruption across the whole world: a heartbreaking number of deaths and a heartbreaking number of people being admitted to hospital and also an economic effect that is being felt by hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, right now. It is something that unites the human race to stop this, to limit the spread, to flatten the curve and to try to protect as much of our wellbeing and way of life as we possibly can.

From our perspective here in this parliament, on this side of the parliament, we are doing everything that we can. Whether it is something that the government is doing to prepare our state or whether it is something to protect our community, to boost our health system or to save jobs, it has our 100 per cent support. But we are also doing our job in being constructive and proposing things that we need to do to take action to get ahead of this. We need to take as much action as possible now. We saw this where our leader proposed closing the borders, and we are glad that has now happened: an unprecedented action that has now taken place, where our borders are effectively closed in South Australia.

We are encouraging the government to hire more health staff. We are encouraging the government to put out a call for people outside the health system who have the qualifications to roll out free flu vaccinations to come back so that we can protect people from flu at the same time that we are confronting the coronavirus. We are encouraging the government to put out a massive stimulus—as Premier Daniel Andrews called it, a survival package—to help those hundreds of thousands of people around the country and tens of thousands, if not more, people in South Australia who are losing their jobs at the moment.

We need very clear communication, and we are encouraging the government to do that on a range of matters and to take every action possible. We do not want to get to the end of this and think that we could have gone harder, that we could have gone sooner and that we could have put more in place to help people, both to protect the community and save people's jobs and to boost our health services, which we know are going to be under tremendous threat. While we have a relatively low number of cases in South Australia, it is climbing exponentially. It has doubled in the past two days, and we are shortly expecting an update of the latest numbers. Where we might be in a week or two in terms of the growth rate is scary. We might be looking at a situation such as Europe or America are facing at the moment.

I am heartbroken by what we are seeing in terms of people losing their jobs. There are people losing jobs in my community, in my electorate and all over the state. This is going to cause so much heartbreak. So many people will face what is going to be the worst winter of their lives in terms of the economic effects. This is a horrible situation where, to defeat this virus, all the things that we rely upon—our economy, our community and connecting—are at polar opposites with what needs to happen.

I would like to thank and pay tribute to all those health staff who work their guts out already but are frankly afraid of the tsunami that is about to come into the health system. They see those images from around the world. We need to thank them and give them everything they need, as well as all those other people who do not get paid very much but are now essential workers, like supermarket clerks, people who collect garbage and cleaners. All of them now have essential status in our community.

I would like to spare a thought for all the families out there who are having some really difficult conversations with their parents and grandparents, who they might not be seeing as much as they used to, and with their children. I am in that category of not really knowing how to talk about this with little kids who want to look at the world as an open and wonderful place. We are confronting these challenges. Let's go as hard as possible, let's take every action and let's fight this together. We need to do that.

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