This week I appeared on BUSINESS NOW ASIA PACIFIC to discuss the different approaches to COVID19 and how Australia needs to change course.
Transcript
[Mike
Senator Malcolm Roberts from Pauline Hanson’s One nation believes the lockdown in Victoria will succeed. However testing needs to be quicker. He also believes that government needs to be more truthful. Now, Victoria has serious problems with infection control will a harder breakdown be effective if they don’t know the source of so many infections.
[Malcolm]
Well, I think there are two things I need to say in response to that Mike. And that is that first of all, this is a very difficult issue. We said that right from the start on the single day sittings on 23rd of March and eighth of April, when we said, there’s no manual for this, it’s entirely new.
We’ve gotta give the government lots of room. We voted in favour that we supported them on their packages and away we went, but we said, you’ve got to get the data. And you’ve got to look elsewhere and start to manage this in accordance with the best practise around the world.
So we might come back to that more later, but what we’ve learned is that quite often, the places where people have prolonged contact in close quarters is where the virus is transmission is highest and that’s the family unit and workplaces. So the family unit in Melbourne is older than in any other city.
And that’s significant because I also saw these figures on one of the radio stations. I heard the figures rather than one of the radio stations. The other thing about Melbourne is that it’s flat and people travel very easily and they travelled to watch football matches, sporting events, games, social venues, et cetera.
So I think that it is difficult. And number one priority is life, securing life, making sure people are healthy and secure and safe. And so a lockdown is essential because they’ve lost control of their borders. They’ve let it go and sorry, lost control of the virus within, in I think multi, foreign, where people are speaking foreign languages.
So they’ve lost control of that because people have not been able to understand the messages about the virus. So that’s where the outbreaks have been. And so I think the lockdown will be effective because it’ll stop families The extended family visits and it’ll stop work obviously.
And so I think the lock downs will be successful in Melbourne. The other thing is that they need to get testing done more quickly because some people are basically having a test and not getting the result back for about 10 days. Now they’re not gonna stay cooped up for 10 days if they don’t believe they’re sick.
And many of these cases that they’re asymptomatic. So I think that while it will work, the government has got to do its bit and getting testing to be more responsive and get results back in two or three days rather than 10. So yeah, there’s potential.
[Mike]
It’s interesting. In South Korea, the testing, from the testing to getting the results back now 12 hours and that’s what it should be when I was talking to professor Justin Fendos in South Korea last week, and he was saying that 12 hours and I mentioned that we have at times up to 10 days and I could hear his jaw hit the table. That’s just atrocious. What should the authorities be doing though?
[Malcolm]
Well, let’s come back to Taiwan if you don’t mind, because South Korea has done a marvellous job. They actually, do you mind if we talk about that?
[Mike]
Yeah, for sure.
[Malcolm]
Okay, South Korea has done a marvellous job. They actually let go let it go. And they had to recover. So given that, and by the way, I’ve watched your interview with professor Fendos. Fabulous interview, very well spoken man knows his facts. And he has been on the same track we’ve been from the right from the start on Monday, March 23rd and April the eighth, in the Senate single day hearings.
We also said, make sure that you get the data to the federal government when we gave them our support. And we said, make sure you looked at Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian nations, Taiwan, especially South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, have done a marvellous job.
Singapore with the exception of Singapore, all the other three and Israel, which had also done a good job, Mike, they have eternal vigilance and they’re ready to do respond quickly to threats because they’re constantly under threat. So that is something we don’t have.
But the, in Taiwan, their population is about the same as Australia. They have 24 million we have 25. The population density in Taiwan is far, far higher than us because their 24 are crammed into a small Island. And they also had an earlier and stronger exchange with China because they’re Chinese themselves.
And so they had a lot more travelling between Taiwan and mainland China. And so they had a much greater problem. Now what the Taiwanese did, and we need to recognise that Australia has had 130 deaths and that’s good, but the Taiwanese have had seven, even despite they had an earlier virus, earlier contact with the virus, seven.
And the other significant point with the Taiwanese is that they didn’t lock down their economy. They actually kept their economy going and they gave responsibility to the people. Now, there are three things that they have done really well. First of all, their basic strategy was to isolate the sick and isolate the vulnerable.
That’s what real quarantine is. Quarantine is not isolating everyone into lockdown. Quarantine is isolating the sick and the vulnerable and separating them out. The second thing they did was that they implemented massive testing and they have a screening process for the testing. And I think South Korea is the same.
They test for high temperature knowing that that’s not always reliable, but they test for high temperature. If someone has a high temperature, then they go and get tested for COVID. And if they test negative, but they still have, for COVID, but still have a high temperature, then they’re allowed to go to work.
So they put responsibility on the workplaces, and what we’ve got in those countries is the responsibility on the individual citizens. And when you have that responsibility, there’s a far greater sense of accountability rather than when it’s imposed.
And the other thing that they’ve done, and I’ve only learned about this recently is they’ve got a much stricter tracing regime, but the tracing apparently doesn’t go right into people’s whereabouts it goes into their localities, and that helps the authorities then get one step in front.
So what I think the, what I think now with those lessons from Taiwan, and we encourage the government to look at Taiwan and South Korea. What I think that we should be doing now is we should be in Australia revising and reviewing our current work. How effective have we been? Where have we not been effective?
We need to recover and plan for recovery in two areas. First of all, to get our economy back to pre COVID, which is February, but then we need to aim far, far higher Mike, we need to get our economy back to, so to the point where we have our sovereignty, restored, our economic sovereignty and economic security and our independence.
We’ve been following this nonsense from the United nations now for almost 70 years. And it’s destroying our sovereignty and our economic independence. And so what the UN has been preaching and our governments have been preaching is interdependence, which means that we are dependent on other countries.
And so what we need to do is to get back at productive capacity, especially for manufacturing and agriculture. And then the third thing we need to do is to plan for future viruses, because this won’t be the last one. And so the biggest thing of all Mike, that we’ve learned is that the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, the Israelis, the Singaporeans, they trust their government.
They don’t give them carte blanche, but they do trust their government. And the government’s lead. In this country governments are too busy, fabricating policies and making and misrepresenting the circumstances.
We haven’t seen the truth on this from the prime minister. We haven’t seen the truth on this from Daniel Andrews, nor Annastacia Palaszczuk. We wrote to Annastacia Palaszczuk and said, “where’s your data. “We want to have a look at it.” She said, it’s in two locations, we went to both locations.
There’s no data. So Scott Morrison right up front. He was saying, six months hibernation, six months hibernation, six months hibernation. We knew there was no plan. And now we know there’s no data driving that plan. These governments are not trusted in this country on a range of issues, electricity, agriculture, stealing farmers property rights.
I mean, you could go on forever, selling ourselves out through international agreements, selling ourselves out the free trade agreements that are giving the other parties the power, we have got to establish trust in our government. And that can only become, can only come with reliance on data and reliance on telling the truth its time Australia got back to that.
[Mike]
Just wondering about the data to have the data we need all the input. We actually have that at our fingertips with credit cards and with Apple, for example, and the other Android devices. And we can, we can actually find out where people have been. The problem we have at the moment, according to professor Fendos, was that it’s reliant on us being honourable or telling the truth. So by having all that data available, it’s going to impact on inverted commas ‘civil liberties.’
[Malcolm]
Well, I get, I go back to my experience when I graduated from university with a mining engineering degree, I thought I’d better go out and start learning something that really mattered. So I worked as a miner for about three years, various mines around the country. And then I went overseas and worked in mines overseas.
So I’ve worked at the coalface and I developed a very healthy respect for miners for all people. And then when I became a mine manager, I would go underground a lot, not to do people’s work, but just to have, listen, and to look so that I can understand what they were going through and what their needs were.
And I can remember turning up at one mine brand new and the workforce detested the mine management because the mine management told lies and it took me a few months, but people started to trust me and that’s extremely important. And then what I was able to do was also to hand over responsibility and authority to the people doing the job.
I mean, not everything we can’t expect the miner to make every decision for the business, but their own jobs. And when people are given that responsibility and that authority they usually come good. And so what’s happening here is government tries to impose things in a crisis.
And we think we’re, a lot of Australians then distrust that, but in, Southeast Asia they’re already practising those things. And we’ve gotta give those governments credit because they’ve had SARS before. So we understand that that’s made it easier, but they’ve learned from that.
And they put it into practise and people are now trusting the government. So if the government tells the truth, if the government hands over responsibility to business owners, venue managers, then they’ll see the people respond because then people take accountability.
But when it’s shoved on them under threat and under control, it’s not taken that accountability is taken when there’s freedom for people to make decisions that autonomy is really important. And we’ve gotta keep giving trust back to people in this country and get the government the hell out of people’s lives.
[Mike]
What about state government? When we have this, where, we’re all Australians, but we have, the new country of Queensland, the new country of Victoria, the new country, new South Wales, South Australia, blah, blah, blah, blah. And each state has its own, not agenda, but it its own approach.
And maybe an agenda also it becomes a little bit political because where the Joan of arc of WA, with a Joan of arc of Victoria, Tasmania. So how do we get all the States working as one country instead of being a number of different countries within this terrible state of Australia?
[Malcolm]
Well, first of all, the thing that unites strategies is data. When everyone’s got the correct data, you’ll end up seeing strategies similar, but across every state, but they will be fine tuned for each state because Queensland is the only state in the country. Yes, that’s correct.
It’s the only state in the country where there are more people outside the capital city than inside the capital city, we’re more decentralised. We’re more spread up the coast with the sparse population inland. And so that’s different from Victoria. That’s different from Tassie.
That’s different from new South Wales and then Western Australia is different again. So I’m very much a believer in our constitution, federal constitution, which is based on competitive federalism, giving a huge amount of sovereignty to the independent States.
Only on national issues should we come together that’s defence, border security, foreign affairs, those kinds of things. And so I’m in favour of letting the state run, but the States themselves also need to get the data so that they can manage effectively. And they need to manage trust in a trustworthy way.
The fundamental thing that we did wrong in this country, I believe with COVID was that we looked automatically to Britain and to a man called Neil Ferguson. And that was a mistake. This Neil Ferguson has done I’ve forgotten the name of the school in medical school, medical college in Britain, but he’s in there and they’ve done a lot of modelling and his models have been proven to be completely wacky.
They have exaggerated the consequences of just about every virus they’ve cared to model every disease they’ve cared to model. Foot and mouth disease they cost the British government way back then when a billion was worth a billion, $10 billion, they cost the British farm economy. They have completely exaggerated.
They forecast millions of deaths, when out of the virus out of the disease in Britain when there were only 120 deaths. I mean, it’s completely ridiculous. We looked to them went straight to lockdown. We didn’t look to Asia. We should’ve looked at Taiwan as well as Britain and worked out where the reality is.
Donald Trump himself started calling out the British. And I don’t think he named Ferguson, but he that’s what he was implying. And we should be coming up with our own strategy, but looking at Taiwan, looking at everywhere in the world and then developing our own. So it’s up to the state governments.
I believe they should be independent. They should be working independently. That’s what gives us greater accountability. It worked up until about 1923, and then that’s been smashed and we’ve centralised more and more. So we need to get back to that competitive federalism, independent States working together. And when they’ve got data, they will have a solid plan. We’ve got to get back to truthful government that relies upon objective data.
[Mike]
Very interesting times we must continue more discussions. There’s so many questions or conversation pieces such as border control, the forthcoming Queensland elections in Australia, the economy and even football. So we can do that next time.
[Malcolm]
I look forward to it Mike. Happy to contact me anytime.
[Mike]
Senator Malcolm Roberts, thank you very much.
[Malcolm]
Thank you, Mike. All the best.
