Television interview with Minister Butler and Angela Bishop, 10 News First – 30 October 2024

ANGELA BISHOP, HOST: Federal Health Minister Mark Butler joins me now to examine further findings from the report. Minister, thanks for your time. The report starts by praising courageous decisions that were made early on and say they saved many lives. When did things start to go wrong in the eyes of the reviewers?
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: First of all, the review makes clear that Australia, in relative terms, performed very well in a once in a century pandemic. We lost 20,000 people or more to COVID directly and many more lives as well for other health impacts. We did do well compared to other nations but we didn't do as well as we could have done and that was really because the leaders of the day didn't have the tools in the toolkit that they needed. When the pandemic started, we didn't have a comprehensive pandemic plan. We didn't have a CDC, a Centre for Disease Control that every other developed country had to provide evidence based, independent advice in a transparent way. The report says that was the key reason that you saw an erosion of trust over the course of the pandemic, to the point where the report's authors say that they don't think the population would accept the decisions that were taken at the height of the pandemic if we had another pandemic tomorrow.
 
BISHOP: Communications, particularly between federal, state and territory governments, have been roundly criticised. Is that a situation that could ever realistically change in the future?
 
BUTLER: Very quickly after the report was received, we accepted the central recommendation, which was to establish the Centre for Disease Control. The key thing about that is that it will be a single national, authoritative source of expert advice that is based in evidence. The report said too often, decisions were made without an evidence-base. There was not a proper risk benefit analysis, including an analysis of broader impacts that decisions would have, for example, on the mental health of children and young Australians. We need a central body that can do just that, give very transparent advice about potential decisions that are grounded in evidence and grounded in good local data. And that's why we committed yesterday $251 million to establish that CDC and start the process of rebuilding community trust.
 
BISHOP: You mentioned school closures, and there are parents and teachers all around Australia speaking about the long-term negative effects of those school closures. The report is adamant that avoiding school closures at all costs in future pandemics would be the ideal course of action. Is the government considering that?
 
BUTLER: The report is very clear that a whole range of decisions were not taken with an evidence-base. A whole range of decisions didn't have an appropriate balance of risks and benefits, not just with the COVID virus in mind, but with broader health impacts, including mental health impacts. And the very clear recommendation is that shouldn't happen in the future. I think what the report says is in the early few months, it was understandable that a very precautionary approach would be taken while we understood the scale of what we were facing, but that at some point beyond, then we should have shifted to a more evidence-based approach, and that governments should have been more transparent about the reasons and the rationales that lay behind decisions that had such a huge impact on our population and their freedoms.
 
BISHOP: You mentioned earlier the erosion of trust in decision making bodies. That damage is enormously hard to reverse. How do you hope to address it?
 
BUTLER: I said yesterday in releasing the report, trust is lost fairly quickly and easily. It's much harder to rebuild it. And we start the process of rebuilding that trust today. And that is really the core reason behind the Centre for Disease Control, so that the community knows that there is an independent body there, looking at the evidence, looking at the data and providing decisions based on that evidence, and that they're doing it in a very transparent way so the community can really kick the tyres on all of these decisions that impact their lives.
 
But the report also found that erosion of trust is not just important for a pandemic response, that erosion of trust has bled into a whole range of other areas. Importantly, for example, the childhood vaccination programme we've seen childhood vaccination for under five-year-olds reduce very sharply over the last few years to the point where we're now below herd immunity levels for really important diseases like measles and whooping cough. This is not just an issue for the next pandemic, and there will be a next pandemic, this is an issue that we're dealing with in other areas of public health as well.
 
BISHOP: One other area is, of course, the economic consequences of the pandemic. What are we still facing there?
 
BUTLER: The report was very clear. The Treasurer pointed this out yesterday that some of the decisions, fiscal decisions and monetary policy decisions by the Reserve Bank meant that inflation was maybe more than two percentage points higher than it needed to be if there was a more calibrated approach. And the Treasurer has talked pretty comprehensively about this report. But it does tell the story about the inflation problem that we inherited when we came to government. This was a global issue, but that it was a higher inflation rate than would otherwise have been the case.
 
BISHOP: So you're confident that these measures with the CDC will ensure we cope better next time, or is our best thing to keep our fingers crossed and pray we never have another one?
 
BUTLER:  The report's authors saw and express their job as putting in place a high level playbook for the future. The CDC is central to doing that. We would have a standing body constantly looking at evidence, constantly involved in data and surveillance to understand what viruses were circulating through Australia, engaging with their equivalents overseas. And overseas CDC’s are very excited about there being one here in Australia, it's been a real gap in the global network. But there are a range of other important recommendations from this report. Cabinet considered the report on Monday, we established a task force led by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to work through all of those recommendations. Many of them are in relation to health and the health portfolio but they cross into education, they cross into the industry department to make sure that we have much better sovereign capability and security of supply of things like vaccines and protective personal equipment in the future.
 
BISHOP: Mark Butler, thank you for your time.
 
BUTLER: My great pleasure.