MCGOWAN GOVERNMENT —
RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN
695. Mr Z.R.F. KIRKUP to the Premier:
Withyour indulgence, Mr Speaker, before I ask
my question I would like to acknowledge the staff and students from Glencoe
Primary School in Halls Head for joining us here this afternoon, and
particularly Mr Culverhouse, who has served some 17 years at the school and who
will be going on much-deserved long-service leave thereafter.
I
refer to the record violent crime in Western Australia, the record ambulance
ramping levels and the many struggling households and small businesses
in our state. Why is the Premier establishing a taxpayer-funded multimillion
dollar spin unit for his re-election campaign disguised as the COVID-19
communications team?
Mr M.
McGOWAN replied:
That question was jam-packed full of
falsehoods. Never in the history of this Parliament has a question been asked that had so many falsehoods jammed into the
preamble. That question must be a world record. Obviously, we are in a pandemic and we have had to deal with a very,
very difficult situation. As I have just outlined, Western Australians
have done very well. Our economy is the strongest in the nation. It has the
strongest jobs growth in the nation. It is the only state that has not gone
into recession. Our land sales, car sales, retail, hospitality and tourism
figures are the strongest in Australia. Our export industries remained open
while some people advocated they should shut. The Western Australian government
has supported all of those initiatives and ensured that our state has been kept
as safe as possible during this pandemic.
Overall, crime figures have gone
down over this period—verifiably. There has been significant disruption
to ambulances because of the cleaning requirements, and the requirement to air
them if there is any suspicion that there may have been someone unwell with
COVID in them. That has caused some delays with ambulances at our hospitals, but that is one of the things that
comes about because of the cleaning regime required for every ambulance
when they go to the hospital.
In relation to the falsehoods
around COVID communications, when COVID came about, the opposition called on us
regularly to do more with communications. I even have letters here from
opposition members. I have a press release
and a letter from the shadow Minister for Health, the current member for
Dawesville, and other correspondence and
communications from members of the Liberal Party demanding more communications
and more effort to inform Western Australians. The government pooled
resources across government in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet and had a major communications team with
people from Health, Police, DPC, Tourism and all other agencies, all
working collaboratively. We did not go outside and get a bunch of consultants
as the last government did. We did not employ Robert Taylor or someone like
that to do our coms. We brought people across government together to work
cooperatively. We set up a centre in the basement of DPC to allow that to
happen. It was a sensible use of resources and collaboration to break down the
silos in a pandemic, which one would think should happen.
Of course, as a consequence of
that, considering that we now have had nearly 160 days without a single case of
community spread of the virus in Western Australia, people have largely
filtered back to their agencies, where they are from, which we would
understand. The government wants to ensure that a pool is available to pull
together should we get a second wave. This is just sensible planning. We will
get those people back together; we have the pool ready so that the moment
anything happens, we can push the button and get them back. That is all this
is. I know there is ridiculous heat and carry-on on radio with people saying
the most ludicrous things, but this is all it is. It is pathetic in a global
pandemic when we are trying to deal with this that the Liberal Party would tell
such falsehoods across the community. We are trying to prevent complacency. We
are trying to ensure that we have the measures ready to implement should we get
a second wave and we will continue to do that because that is in the interests
of the people of this state.