I do support this bill. I do not support the lockdowns, but, having locked down, we do need to provide people with assistance. I don’t want to delay the passage of this bill, but I want to ask the minister a couple of quick questions. Firstly, has the government calculated the cost of each life saved from lockdowns? If so, what is that cost? How does it compare to the guidance note that is on the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s website on the value of statistical life. That guidance note says:
Willingness to pay is the appropriate way to estimate the value of reductions in the risk of physical harm—known as the value of statistical life.
That value is around $5 million. I realise it’s hard to reduce things to a single number, but if we didn’t do this from time to time we’d all be driving Volvos. Secondly, what is the case fatality rate of the delta outbreak in New South Wales and how does that compare to the case fatality rate of the outbreaks last year in Australia?
As I said, I don’t want to delay the committee and I thank the minister for that insightful answer. I did just want to put on the record here, in fairness to the government, this government, the federal government, is not the one imposing the lockdowns. But it is an indictment of state governments that they have not been transparent about simple calculations about how much this is actually costing the Australian people, especially those poorer than most of us in this place, who have just had their income smashed, their ability to pay their bills gone, their mortgages at risk and sometimes their relationships destroyed. There’s an enormous cost to these things. It’s not being properly accounted for in the decision-making.
I can only do rough estimates, because the modelling and transparency is not there, but the Burnett Institute this week—I know, a group who were in favour of lockdowns—estimated that the lockdowns in Sydney have prevented 4,000 coronavirus cases. The fatality rate in Sydney has stabilised at about 0.4 per cent of cases in the last few weeks. That would mean that these lockdowns have so far prevented 16 deaths. AMP estimate the lockdowns are costing $150 million a day. At the time of the Burnett Institute modelling, the lockdown had been going on for 35 days, so AMP puts the cost at $5.3 billion for avoiding 16 deaths. The cost of lives saved is $330 million on those calculations. That is 66 times the figure that the federal government accrues to the value of statistical life in this country.
As I said before, it’s very hard to reduce these things to numbers but, as someone who lives in a country area, where we do not have the same health services as everywhere else, I understand very closely how we have to sometimes make trade-offs. We have, where I live, a five-year-lower life expectancy in Central Queensland than people born in Sydney, but I realise we can’t have a tier-1 hospital in Emerald and we can’t have cancer units all over remote Australia. We have to make choices about how we spend and allocate public resources to health outcomes. We have to make choices. Right now, we’re ignoring these hard choices at great cost, especially those of us who do have the luxury of a guaranteed income despite a lockdown occurring or not. That is a complete abrogation of our duty and of what we should be doing through this crisis, especially given we don’t have to bear any of the costs of these lockdowns at all.
My final point is on fatality rates. I thank the minister; he’s absolutely right about the effectiveness of the vaccines. They have clearly been effective through this latest outbreak, because that fatality rate in Sydney is running at 0.4 per cent. It has stabilised in the last few weeks; it is not increasing. It looks to be about level and consistent with fatality rates for the delta strain in other countries where vaccines are available.
Last year, of all coronavirus infections, 3.2 per cent of Australians who got infected died, so last year the case fatally rate was 3.2 per cent. During this last Sydney outbreak, it’s 0.4 per cent. We hear a lot about the delta strain being more transmissible—we should run for the hills, apparently. I do not question that. This is a much more transmissible variant and it is tough to deal with for state governments. But clearly, we should also let the Australian people know that the risk of dying from this strain now is much lower. It’s not the strain. I just want to be careful. It is probably not the strain; we don’t really know. The epidemiologists have not made conclusions yet about the exact fatality rates of the delta strain. But now what is happening, as the minister outlined, now that our most vulnerable are vaccinated—almost everybody in aged-care homes is vaccinated—we’re not seeing the same fatal outcomes as we did last year. The delta strain is different because it’s killing 90 per cent fewer people than the alpha and the original Wuhan strain did last year. With that difference, why are we deciding on the same costly policy decisions as we did last year? What we’re doing is fighting the last war. It’s a common mistake of all governments, that we always look back and go, ‘Well, that worked last time; let’s do it again.’
I was supportive of the lockdowns last year; they did work. They were the right thing to do at the time. But it’s a different war now, and we’re applying the same costly responses despite the information and facts on the ground being totally different. We’re just ignoring them because we’re going along with the sheep, and the public are wanting to obsess about coronavirus cases, not leading and saying, ‘This is what’s happening on the ground.’ And we need to make sure we do not impose undue costs, especially on people who do not have the flexibility and option that those of us have—the luxury to work from home.
