Author: Julie Blakey

Health and wellbeing Science and technology

Why banning wet markets won’t prevent another pandemic

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 8 June 2021

Julie Blakey

COVID-19 has created havoc around the world, with much of the globe over one–third of the world’s population estimated to be—or have been—under lockdown and experiencing restrictions on freedom unimaginable only a year ago.earlier this year.

Economists fear the economic impacts will be the worst since the Great Depression of 1929 and hundreds of millions of jobs will be lost around the world. Given the devastation, extremely strong measures should be taken to ensure that it never happens again.

COVID-19 most likely originated in a wet market with wildlife species in Wuhan, China. It most likely originated in bats, and jumped to humans through an intermediary source—probably via pangolins.

Consequently, there has been pressure from international governments, NGOs and celebrities calling for the closure of all wet markets (and all wildlife markets by some). Opponents would ask: is calling for a closure of all wet and wildlife markets likely to get us to our objective of ensuring something like COVID-19 doesn’t happen again?

To answer this question, we first need to understand wet markets.

Misunderstood, not malicious

Wet markets are varied and complex across Asia and the world. Wet markets sell fresh produce; ‘wet’ refers to the fresh fruit, vegetables and meat sold on the premises. In many ways, they are run-of-the-mill farmers markets. The issue for a lot of people is that live animals are present, and sometimes butchered at some of these markets. Only a minority of wet markets sell exotic wildlife, and many of these exist outside of China. In fact, a lot of the images we have seen go viral on social media are of bats in Tomohon, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, not from Wuhan.

Sanitary standards vary widely across wet markets. Many feature excellent health risk management, while others have wild and domestic animals crowded together in unsanitary conditions. Wet markets exist around the world including in countries such as Sweden, where they are well-governed and managed. We even have wet markets in Australia—for example, the Melbourne and Sydney Fish Markets.

Wet markets are an important source of fresh food and livelihood for millions of people in East Asia, West Africa and globally. They connect low income farmers directly with consumers, and are often considered a safer and more reliable source of food than larger supermarkets in countries with weak regulations. Many of these wet markets are also located away from large cities or towns, like in Cameroon’s Korup rainforest where villages are hours away from a supermarket or shopping complex.

So, calling for a shutdown of all wet markets will likely not only affect millions of lives and livelihoods, but it is also likely to be unworkable and ineffective.

Three principles for preventing the next pandemic

Our experience from researching and working in the policymaking, governance and enforcement of the wildlife trade internationally provide a number of insights for ensuring that something like COVID-19 never happens again.

Bans without local support mostly fail: Bans that do not consider the circumstances and needs of the people affected by them—and are not culturally sensitive—will most probably flounder. Failed bans lead to markets going underground, making them even more difficult to regulate and significantly more dangerous for disease emergence.
Focus on high-risk markets and species: A targeted approach that focuses on high-risk markets with poor sanitary practices (both in China and internationally) and high-risk species for emerging infectious diseases, such as horseshoe bats and great apes, is likely to reduce disease risk more effectively than a broad attempt at a blanket ban.
Ensure sustainability of new regulations and practices: Evidence of high-risk markets should be combined with consideration for different local contexts, cultural perceptions and values towards wildlife, wildlife trade and consumption. This is more likely to lead to sustainable solutions and policies with local buy-in, in which risks to public health, animal welfare, and conservation are effectively minimised.

It is critical that we focus on the markets, species and production practices that pose the highest risk for public health concern. Homing in on better sanitation, identifying and better regulating high-risk markets such as those that sell both domestic and wild species in China and beyond would make a lot more sense, and is much more likely to reduce the risk of a future COVID-19-type destructive episode than calls for blanket bans.

Author

Duan Biggs is a Senior Research Fellow at the Environmental Futures Research Institute, and School of Environment and Science at Griffith University. He is the founder and lead of the applied research group, Resilient Conservation which focusses on a range of multi-disciplinary, applied conservation challenges including the illegal wildlife trade.

Follow Duan on Twitter.

Health and wellbeing, Science and technology

Why Australia must rethink burning forests to save them

The bushfires of the summer of 2019-2020 which covered more than 10 million hectares, were exacerbated by human intervention. In this climate emergency, business as usual is not an option, and hazard reduction burning and backburning must be re-evaluated.

The Ethics of Cancel Culture

If we think a person’s speech is wrong and immoral, we might suppose there is no great loss about a debate being derailed and the person sanctioned. But there are genuine ethical concerns here.

Why CRISPR gene editing is a promising but imperfect solution to genetic disease

Health and wellbeing Science and technology

Why CRISPR gene editing is a promising but imperfect solution to genetic disease

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 8 June 2021

Julie Blakey

You may have heard about gene therapy over the years— the promise that we could replace genes in those people born with as little as one unwanted variance in the 3 billion ‘bits’ that make up our genome. These variations cause diseases, such as haemophilia or cystic fibrosis, that were seen as incurable—many people who suffer from them have reduced quality of life and die prematurely.

Recent advances in technology have brought the promise of gene therapy closer than ever to being realised. One true breakthrough is clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), and this year its pioneers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. CRISPR offers a radical new method for gene therapy that builds on decades of science. What’s clear is that there is much more to learn, all while navigating some deep ethical questions.

Three decades of progress

Gene therapy had its first approved clinical trial in 1990, when doctors from the United States National Institute of Health treated four-year-old Ashanti DeSilva, who was suffering from a rare genetic disease known as severe combined immunodeficiency. She was unable to make a key enzyme—Important for immunity —so was at constant risk of contracting a deadly infections. Doctors injected her with a virus that replaced a malfunctioning copy of a gene needed to get her immune system working. This treatment markedly improved her immune system function, allowing her to live a normal life for the first time.

Since then, there have been close to 3,000 clinical trials worldwide. It was only in 2017, though, that the FDA approved the first gene therapy treatment for inherited disease. Progress has been slow due to trouble perfecting the drug delivery, intellectual property complexity and clinical trial issues. The approved product, Luxturna, by Spark Therapies, treated retinal dystrophy— – a degenerative condition of the eye that can cause total blindness.

This form of total gene replacement therapy is promising, but it has a critical limitation: only a small amount of DNA can be fitted into the virus vectors used to deliver the gene to cells. These vectors simply do not have the capability to facilitate truly transformative gene therapy—they are unruly and imprecise. This meant we needed another solution. Enter CRISPR.

A bacterial discovery

The story of the development of CRISPR starts in 1987, when scientists in Japan noticed something unusual in the DNA of E.coli bacteria. Subsequent study by other groups confirmed that this strange pattern, named the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR), was the mechanism by which bacteria defended themselves from viruses. This capacity was repurposed by Charpentier and Doudna to edit human genes in 2012. Their effort was hailed as the scientific breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2015, and in 2020 it won Nobel prize in Chemistry.

CRISPR technology was able to repair genes in living cells and living organisms using a tiny payload, meaning we no longer had to replace whole genes. It’s like fixing a fence where only one pale is broken—: you don’t replace the whole fence, just the broken pale. Indeed, many genetic diseases only have one or two deviations in the entire gene, so the advantages were obvious. CRISPR, it turns out, is also fairly safe and specific.

With great promise for CRISPR comes great responsibilities

The potential for CRISPR is that those suffering from a genetic condition may in the future have an avenue for treatment that did not exist in the past. But CRISPR can do more than that. It is also able to destroy bad genes, such as those that cause cancer, by editing them to be turned off. Indeed, here at Griffith, we were the first in the world to take this approach to destroy a cancer gene from the virus that causes cervical cancers and cure animals of cancer using CRISPR. This ability to destroy genes means—like the bacteria CRISPR originally came from—we can use CRISPR to attack viral or bacterial infections, handy in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance.

But there is a dark side. In 2018, a Chinese researcher announced the world’s first CRISPR babies. He had edited their DNA to delete a gene that allowed HIV to infect cells. This gene is naturally mutated in 1 per cent of northern European people, making them resistant to HIV disease—the researcher’s intention was to make these babies also resistant to infection. But this gene is known to also affect cognitive function, and so the unethical experiment may have harmed these children. The scientist, He Jiankui, at the time a researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, was sentenced to three years’ jail by a China court in 2019 after being found guilty of illegal medical practices. It reminds us that with any new technology there is always the potential to harm.

There are numerous ethical questions that arise from the use of CRISPR, especially surrounding safety, consent, justice and equity, and use on human embryos. In the end, it’s up to society as a whole to decide on the best way to use this new technology.

"This may be the tool we need to end cancer"

Watch this space, because the technology is improving every month and the first treatments are already being tested in the clinic. We can navigate the ethics of this technology, and in the futurefuture, I believe it will be seen as the greatest medical breakthrough in human history. CRISPR will allow us to consign genetic diseases and most cancers to the archives of history.

Author

Professor Nigel McMillan is a cancer researcher interested in the infectious causes of cancer. Nearly ⅓ of all cancers are caused by viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms. He is an internationally recognised expert in the area of human papillomavirus, gene editing and gene silencing. He has over 90 publications and has had continuous NHRMC funding for 22 years. He has graduated over 40 Masters or Honours students and 22 PhD students.

Health and wellbeing, Science and technology

Advice to the 46th Parliament: Integrity and Accountability

Professor AJ Brown on his Top 5 Integrity and Accountability issues that the 46th Parliament need to address.

What social media tells us about Australians and the jab

Australia’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout has hit yet another crossroads. Public confidence has wavered following the federal government’s announcement last week that the Pfizer vaccine was the preferred choice for people under age 60.

Climate change and the great Australian insurance dilemma

Underinsurance and un-insurability are growing in Australia and creating a plethora of social justice issues. With low-income earners and first home buyers disproportionately exposed to risks.

Business and government

Climate change and the great Australian insurance dilemma

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 8 June 2021

Julie Blakey

The Federal Government made a significant pre-Budget announcement to deal with an accelerating crisis in the price of insurance premiums for Northern Australia, following the ACCC inquiry. The Morrison Government announced a new reinsurance pool would cover cyclone and related flood damage in northern Australia from 1 July 2022, and would be backed by a $10 billion government guarantee. This was estimated to reduce insurance premiums across Northern Australia by over $1.5 billion for households, strata and small businesses over 10 years. But the Commonwealth Government stopped short of becoming the insurer of last resort, and critics warned that even the guarantee might become extremely costly. Will it be enough? And what about the rest of Australia?

Climate scientists have long warned of Australia’s vulnerability to climate change. Yet, as greenhouse gases continue to warm our environment and government intervention remains low, what will this mean for Australian homeowners and those looking to buy? Insurance providers have become increasingly aware of the volatility that climate change represents, raising concerns that some parts of Australia – and some Australians – will and are already becoming uninsurable.

"Australia’s insurance dilemma will only worsen if left unchecked. There is a clear necessity for government intervention to prevent or reduce the escalating impacts of climate change."

As it stands, the Morrison government is jeopardising access to affordable or accessible insurance by prioritising emissions intensive industries such as natural gases, coal, and beef. Without significant policy shifts, there are serious concerns surrounding the availability and accessibility of everything from health to home insurance and beyond.

Australia is not on track to meet emissions targets, with the Morrison government instead pushing heightened investment into a $600 gas plant in the last federal budget, under the guise of stimulating a COVID-19 economic recovery. As emissions intensive and resource exploitative projects are prioritised, climate targets set by the Paris Agreement and Kyoto Protocol are increasingly unattainable. Australia’s warming climate will continue influencing the severity and frequency of climate disasters, contributing to the rising trend of underinsurance, with 718, 000 households becoming effectively or completely uninsurable by 2100.

Further, underinsurance and un-insurability are expected to grow and create a plethora of social justice issues. These include issues surrounding plummeting property values due to climate volatility, with low-income earners and first home buyers disproportionately exposed to risks. As high-risk areas spread, demand for properties within affected catchments are expected to plummet, with properties in low-risk areas drastically inflating and becoming inaccessible for many Australians. Unsuitable residential planning has reinforced these risks. In 2014 Brisbane’s lord mayor stated that due to anticipated population growth over the upcoming 20 years Australia has no other option than to push towards continued development in areas exposed to flooding, coastal inundation, fires, and other weather extremities.

To meet expected population growth there has been a push towards regional development in Norwell, a low-lying agricultural area prone to flooding. Construction across high-risk areas over the previous 10 years has expanded, with the approved development in 2017 of the Sunshine Coast University Hospital less than 100 metres from a major marshland, and the erection of a large block of units approved for construction atop the Carrara floodplains. Redland Bay and other coastal properties are at immense risk, with properties regularly flooding at high tide. As sea levels continue to rise by over 1 metre by 2100, this proposes immense risk for homeowners situated along Australia’s coast.

We know that government intervention can decrease volatility for insurers through investment in reducing the pace and impact of climate change. Policy instruments include regulating emissions, achieving resilience through infrastructure, building codes and mandates, improved residential and commercial land use planning, and increased funding towards emergency response units such as fire services or defence. At the low-end of the scale, intervention includes conducting regular and increased mitigation activities, such as fire breaks or backburning, which will inevitably require increased funding back to stripped national parks and other environmental services.

Government intervention has worked before. In Roma, Queensland, construction of a levee basin was enacted to counteract devastating flood effects, reducing risks for coinciding insurance costs. Following the basin construction, insurance premiums in the area had decreased by an average of 30 to 80 per cent. The potential construction of a $40 million levee basin in Bundaberg was announced by the Queensland Government in late 2020 and is expected to reduce premiums by an average of 10 to 30 percent if implemented. The erection of the basin has been recommended since flooding in 2013, where flooding caused $1.1 billion in damages, with 10, 300 buildings at risk. Disaster mitigation and resilience planning saves $6 for every $1 spent, signalling that a proactive approach is significantly effective in reducing damages caused by weather extremities, lessening volatility for insurers.

The Federal Government has previously partnered with state and local governments to provide some level of resilience through schemes such as the Resilience and Risk Reduction Fund, as well as separate initiatives to burden a small portion of financial burdens for local governments, businesses, and residents. However, a defining factor is that ‘resilience’ activities and funding are primarily centred around awareness, rather than strong mitigation policies such as the tackling of greenhouse gas emissions, management of ethical ‘retreats’ for towns and localities in high-risk areas, as well as a suite of other policies that can enact real change to mitigate climate impacts and therefore reduce insurance risk and burden.

Ultimately, addressing these issues around insurance access and inflation in identified high-medium risk and surrounding areas is a crucial issue requiring government interference. With intervention, we could potentially prevent bullions worth of future disaster damages, whilst reducing damage to property and people, and navigating the emerging threat or irreparable cities and forced climate migration.

AuthorS

Zoe Davidson is a graduate of Griffith Business School (Government and International Relations) and Research Analyst in the Policy Innovation Hub, at Griffith University. Zoe’s interests include enhancing sustainability and ensuring corporate social responsibility outcomes through policy revision and implementation.

Dr Elise Stephenson is an expert in public diplomacy, national security, entrepreneurship and gender equality across Australia and the Indo-Pacific region. She is a multi award-winning researcher and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Policy Innovation Hub and Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, Australia.

Her current research fields cover government and international relations, as well as entrepreneurship and the Asia Pacific. She is primarily interested in how Australia engages with its region and the world — whether from a diplomatic, national security, or entrepreneurial lens — as well as whom is at the forefront of that engagement — specifically looking at gender and sexuality. Elise is recognised by Google and Deloitte as one of Australia’s 50 Outstanding LGBTI+ leaders, and is Griffith University’s overall Outstanding Young Alumni Awardee of 2020.

Follow Elise on Twitter

Business and government

Advice to the 46th Parliament: Integrity and Accountability

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Can Australia be drought-proofed?

Water is critical to life and jobs, and large infrastructure projects tend to sway voters at the polling booth. Paired together, it’s easy to understand why the New Bradfield Scheme remains an issue for Queensland and Australia.

Bold Rage: A manifesto for empowering Gen X

Looking back over my family tree, the last century has been kind to my ancestors. Many of them have made it to a ripe old age, with some outliving previous generations twice over. But as a member of the next generation to move into middle age (and, if I’m lucky, beyond that), I find myself already ‘burning and raving’ and raging against what I see as narrow options ahead.

Society and culture

Bold Rage: A manifesto for empowering Gen X

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 8 June 2021

Julie Blakey

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Dylan Thomas

I guess I’ve seen some of the worst of options for ageing. As a student I worked as a home help, cleaning houses for older people living at home alone. As I cleaned, they often talked. I heard that physical decline had reduced their ability to leave their homes; that family members and friends had either died or were unable to visit; that they felt constrained and undervalued, despite believing that they still had so much to offer.

Later, as a social worker, part of my job was to ensure that older people didn’t get ‘stuck’ in hospitals when they were unable to return to independent living. It was my job to take them on visits to nursing homes (now renamed ‘aged-care facilities’) into which they might consider moving. I still think about some of these people, who were ‘placed’ in ‘care’ that seemed far from anything I would consider caring in nature or form.

Over the past five years, in my work as a social designer and innovator, I’ve had the opportunity to explore how Baby Boomers are starting to reshape ageing, and how they are facing challenges that include the so-called ‘epidemic’ of loneliness; the increasingly evident divide between those who are ageing in wealth, and those who are ageing in poverty; growing homelessness, particularly among older women; and the still inadequate care options for those who have neither the willingness to canvas current aged-care facilities, nor the resources to fund alternatives.

But I am part of Generation X. Born between 1964 and 1980, we’re squeezed between Baby Boomers and the Gen Y/Millennial nexus. The Boomers are associated with revolutionising social norms in Australia and credited with being the wealth generators of the twentieth century. The Ys and the Millennials are defined by connections to technology and their status as ‘digital natives’. We Gen Xers are said to be left with no distinct defining features of our own.

I disagree: we are self-reliant; we embrace diversity; we are readily exposed to various new media platforms; and we are currently the most heavily indebted generation in Australia. We are also heading rapidly and somewhat uncomfortably into middle age while the Baby Boomers move towards retirement with optimism, big families and the largest slice of wealth of any previous generation.

The Baby Boomers were first urged by historian Peter Laslett to create a ‘fresh map of life’ by harnessing a period of ‘personal achievement and enrichment’ after retiring and entering into their ‘third age’, one in which it was more possible to continue being healthy and active while getting older. Joseph Couglin from MIT AgeLab has railed at Boomers to consider what to do with all that extra, precious time between retirement and death: ‘Over the past century, we’ve created the greatest gift in the history of humanity – thirty extra years of life – and we don’t know what to do with it!… Why don’t we take that one-third and create new stories, new rituals, new mythologies for people as they age?’

Now, Gen Xers have the opportunity to redefine the territory of these life maps and, in many ways, an obligation to switch from personal to planetary enrichment. In the same timeframe that we have left before ‘retirement’, the outlook for our planet is grave. According to a recent European study, the 2030s will also be the point of ‘no return’ when it will become almost impossible to stop Earth’s temperature rising by a minimum of 2-degrees celsius, thereby consolidating the trajectory of climate change we are already witnessing in Australia. As the generation leading the decisions made up to that point, we will be the first generation to age into the consequences of those decisions.

Read the rest of ‘Bold Rage‘ at Griffith Review.

Author

Ingrid Burkett is a social designer, designing processes, products and knowledge that deepen social impact and facilitate social innovation. She has contributed to the design of policy and processes in a diversity of fields, including community development, local economic development, disability, procurement and social investment.

Ingrid is Co-Director of The Yunus Centre at Griffith University

Follow Ingrid on Twitter

A Better Future for All series Past events

In Conversation with The Honourable Annastacia Palaszczuk MP

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 5 June 2021

Julie Blakey

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has a unique opportunity to lead Queensland through the state’s first four-year fixed term with an increased majority after the 2020 state election. At this critical time the big decisions her government makes will shape Queensland’s future for many years to come. She is already Australia’s longest-serving female Premier and the longest-serving female head of Government in Australia’s history. What does Annastacia Palaszczuk want her legacy to be?

Play Video

Professor Carolyn Evans, Vice Chancellor and President of Griffith University

Good evening, everybody. I’m Carolyn Evans, the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University and Griffith University, along with our partner HOTA – the Home of the Arts here on the beautiful Gold Coast – is really grateful to welcome all of you here tonight. Can I begin by respectfully acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet tonight, pay my respect to their elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today. Could I also acknowledge the Honorable Anastasia Palaszczuk MP, Premier of Queensland, Minister for Trade, and our special guest tonight; the Chancellor of Griffith University, Mr. Henry Smerdon; Megan Scanlon, Minister for the Sciences, Youth and Great Barrier Reef; Councillors of the City of the Gold Coast, Ryan Bayldon-Lumsden, Mark Hamill, Brooke Patterson, Darren Taylor and Pauline Young; Professor Emeritus Ned Pankhurst, Chair of the Board of Directors at HOTA; Ms. Criena Gehrke, CEO of HOTA; and of course, our Mr. Kerry O’Brien, the host of the Better Future for All series. It’s great pleasure to welcome you to the seventh in the Better Future for All series of conversations, and the first for 2021. It’s being held here at the Home of the Arts, and this is the first time we’ve been able to have a large audience, so it’s delightful to see you all here tonight. Our aim in this series is to bring together outstanding thinkers and leaders and entice them over a long form interview to share their insights in complex and thoughtful ways about the future. We’re very privileged tonight to be hearing directly from the Queensland Premier, the Honorable Anastasia Palaszczuk, less than three months following her party’s historic third electoral victory. In conversation with Ms. Palaszczuk this evening is Kerry O’Brien, one of Australia’s foremost journalists, commentators and writers. For those of you who’ve been following the series, you’ll know the skill and the experience that he has brought to these interviews. This is a timely conversation. As we look to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, Queensland’s done well to minimize the health impacts of the virus and with a vaccine on the way, I know for many of us, there’s a desire to understand what our pathway back to whatever normal will look like is, especially for those in hard hit sectors of the economy, and I know many of us on the Gold Coast are included in that. At this critical time, the big decisions the Premier and her government make will shape Queensland future for many years to come and help to define her legacy as Premier. It’s already a formidable legacy. She is Australia’s longest serving female premier, and by mid-year, will be the longest serving female head of government in Australia’s history. She was sworn in as Premier of Queensland on the 14th of February 2015. In November 2017, she was elected Premier for a second term, and as we all know, in October last year, elected Premier for a third term. Ms. Palaszczuk was the first woman in Australia to become Premier from the opposition. She’s the only woman to win two terms and now three terms in government. She began her career in Queensland parliament in September of 2006 when she became the representative for the Inala electorate, and her first ministerial role came into the 2009 election when she was appointed Minister for Disability Services and Multicultural Affairs. In 2011, she was appointed Minister for Transport, a position she held until the March 2012 election when she became Leader of the Opposition. That’s quite a formidable track record, and I know you’re all eagerly looking forward to hearing this exchange. So, without further introduction, please welcome Kerry O’Brien.

Kerry O’Brien

Thanks Carolyn and Anastasia Palaszczuk. Thank you very much for making the time for this conversation: an hour is generous, and it’ll go quickly. I’m keen to explore what you’re going to do with the unique opportunity that you have in this term of government Queensland’s first fixed four-year term with a working majority and no other house to get in the way.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk

Excellent.

Kerry O’Brien

I thought you might say that. But since the pandemic continues to dominate all else, I think we need to start the vaccines rollout – is about the start and although it will be run from Canberra, the states will obviously be critical to success. I assume that you and all the other Premiers have been kept fully briefed. What outcome are you expecting for Queensland in terms of the effectiveness of the rollout?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, we’ve started off with a very tough question already, Kerry, and I think the rollout of the vaccine is really important. It’s something that we’re all very much looking forward to, and I’m going to be encouraging everyone to get the vaccine as well. If Dr. Young said to me, it’s safe to get it, I’m going to be getting it, and I think everyone else should as well. And we have to do it: we’re in extraordinary times. And if we want to get to some sort of back to how life was, it’s absolutely crucial. So later this month, the Pfizer vaccine will come and then that’ll be followed by AstraZeneca. And of course, the key here is distribution. How do we get it out to so many places across Queensland, which is so decentralized, it’s going to be very complex. All the details are being worked through at the moment. Professor Murphy has actually asked us to send someone from each state and territory and embed themselves in Canberra. So, we can be confident that the vaccine rollout will be done according to schedule. But of course, it’s up to the Federal government to get the supply. What we don’t know is what’s going to happen in the future. And I just read a study the other day about what’s happening over in Boston and Harvard Medical School, where they’re seeing this virus mutate. And as it mutates, it’s actually avoiding the antibodies that are produced in the body. So this is very complex. It’s changing all the time. So, I think it’s really important that we get vaccinated as quickly as possible to stop the virus from mutating.

Kerry O’Brien

So obviously, the end goal is herd immunity. The end goal is a point where only a small percentage of the population is still immune – is still vulnerable. Do you think we can get there this year?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I do, in terms of the rollout of the vaccine, but then we’re going to have to see how that goes. We’re seeing some good evidence initially out of the UK that’s starting to trend of the virus. We are hearing it’s effective against the UK strain, we need more evidence in about the South American strain and the South African strain. These are unknowns.

Kerry O’Brien

And that’s just right now, that’s just the strains now.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think we sort of got to understand COVID in its original form, early on over the last 12 months. But now with the UK strain – and the people here would have seen how we had to do a sudden and quick lockdown – when the Hotel Grand Chancellor, we had a community positive person with that UK strain, which came from hotel quarantine. We’re now seeing what’s happening in Melbourne, and we’ve also had issues over in Perth. This is the unknown. So, we all have to work together. We all have to be united as a country. But we have to deal with these issues quickly. Because if this strain is 70% more contagious, we need to act quickly, because the quarantine is our last line of defense.

Kerry O’Brien

I was watching the health experts at the Press Club a couple of days ago. And one of them was talking about the need – if we’re going to actually get this vaccine on the schedule – it’s going to be something like 160,000 to 190,000 vaccinations a week nationally. And for Queensland, on my rough maths, and I’m not sure how many children, the adults there are in Queensland, but you’re probably talking 15,000 to 20,000 people a week. Can you do that?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, the Commonwealth has to put out the schedule. And there’s a whole network of GPS out there. What they are seeing in some other countries is that they’re using convention centres to get the mass vaccination happening. So, all of this finite detail needs to be worked out and that is what the Federal government needs to do. But as a state, we are entering into bilaterals with the Federal government about the rollout. The states have good service delivery. And I’m very confident that by working together, we can affect a rollout. But, of course, we need a supply of the AstraZeneca, which the large majority of its going to be manufactured in Melbourne is my understanding, and of course we need the supply of the Pfizer. So, that is the federal government’s responsibility. A good communications campaign because there are a lot of people out there. We’ve got good rates of immunization in Queensland for vaccination. But I’m very concerned that if the communications campaign is not solid, there’ll be people who won’t go and get the vaccine.

Kerry O’Brien

Now you’re at pains to stretch the Commonwealth’s overall responsibility and I would be sympathetic to that. I would imagine any State Premier will be saying exactly the same thing. But where does your responsibility begin and end? So you’re talking about the need for unity on this as much as anything? What happens if something goes wrong? What happens if one state’s rollout seems to be slower than others? I mean, are we going to start seeing the blame game taking place there? You’re going to be saying, if it happens in Queensland, are you going to be saying, well, that’s the Commonwealth? And they’re going to be saying, actually, it’s you.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, I think if we go back to look at quarantine, and let’s be honest here, we never thought our hotels, our hotels for tourists and business people, were going to be used for quarantining people returning from overseas with a virus. Our hotels were never built for that. And all of the states were able to very, very quickly upgrade to put in place quarantine measures.

Kerry O’Brien

Somewhat in perfectly, to one degree or another from one state to another.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, sure. But this is brand new for governments. I didn’t know 18 months ago, well you know, from before we declared a state of emergency at the end of health emergency at the end of January last year, that we were going to have to set up hotels for quarantine. I mean, this is an extraordinary time, we are living in with extraordinary circumstances. And I think the national cabinet has served a really good purpose in that we’ve been able to come together and discuss these issues where you have Professor Murphy, you have the Chief Health Officer, giving us all the most up to date information. Plus, we also have the head of Treasury and the head of the Reserve Bank, who also update us regularly on the state of the economy.

Kerry O’Brien

And so, this is the other big half of the equation. This is the economy. So, let’s say herd immunity is achieved within Queensland and the rest of Australia. How confident can you be that that will mean immunity from all strains, which you’ve touched on briefly, of COVID-19, potentially coming in from overseas?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, they’re the big questions, aren’t they? I think because we’ve seen massive lockdowns overseas, where the virus has gotten out of control, where governments overseas have failed to take health as their number one objective, and let the economy run, we’ve seen what’s happened. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially in the US – quite absolutely tragic – where governments here, for example, have taken quick and swift action focusing on health first, our economy has been able to recover faster. That’s just the reality.

Kerry O’Brien

But there’s still a lot of big question marks about what that means about how real recovery is and how sustainable that recovery is. One of the things that I wonder whether we’re going to drop, I mean, we the public generally now are going to be inclined to drop the ball a little bit in terms of our own awareness, as we get the sense that the vaccine is rolling out that somehow rather it’s all going to be just about over. I mean, the cases are still going to be coming in from overseas, they’re still going to leach out of the quarantine system out there.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, that’s where I think we cannot be complacent. So, even when our quarantine workers will have the vaccine, I think we still have to have precautions in place because we just don’t know how the mutation is going to be. But I think the world is very much focused on getting the planet vaccinated. I mean, we’ve heard World Health Organization commentary on how it’s absolutely a priority to vaccinate as quickly as possible.

Kerry O’Brien

Do you think most Queenslanders feel an urgency now about the need to vaccinate, particularly those who haven’t been directly touched by it?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think that’s where you need a very effective communications campaign, but also too, Queenslanders have done everything that we have asked them to do during this pandemic and we would not be in a situation we are today if it wasn’t for the fact that Queenslanders have stepped up every single time during the pandemic, whether that was having to close businesses having to stay at home, having you know, not being able to see relatives, not being able to go to church. I mean, these are, like, our whole world was turned upside down and now as The Chief Health Officer said to me, she said, “Premier, I can see light at the end of the tunnel, I can see a way out of this pandemic with the vaccine”. And I think that the public needs to have absolute confidence that the TGA does not approve a vaccine – it goes through all the processes completely independent of the political process – and they will not take off a vaccine unless they deem it to be safe.

Kerry O’Brien

So, I assume you’re as well briefed as anyone in the country and sorry, and the other aspect of all of this is that there’s no guarantee that they won’t be further border closures, either here or between the two of the other states, right through this process.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

That’s correct. I mean, we’re monitoring the situation in Melbourne at the moment, we’re having another briefing at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, where we get the most up to date information. And we are monitoring to see if there is any community transmission that’s happening.

Kerry O’Brien

And that could still be the case three months from now, four months from now, we might be a certain way into the, into the rollout. But these flair-ups will still be potentially possible even in four or five- or six-months’ time.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

You’re absolutely correct. But I think what we did when we had the lockdown for the Greater Brisbane region, it actually worked incredibly well that people listen, but I actually asked the National Cabinet, I said, we’re declaring this a hotspot. I’m asking everywhere else across the country to also declare it a hotspot. I think that worked incredibly well.

Kerry O’Brien

But I’m I suppose I’m getting to the economy next.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Yes.

Kerry O’Brien

And that’s the context in which I’m asking this because, of course, we’ve got that huge problem in terms of international exchange of goods and passengers and so on. But the domestic economy has also been severely disrupted, and your tourism industry in Queensland is a classic case in point.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

The tourism industry has absolutely been impacted.

Kerry O’Brien

So, there’s still going to be no certainty for any of these big industries, big businesses, small businesses, right through Australia and right through Queensland.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

That’s correct. But can I give you some other examples, the fact that we’ve been able to contain the virus, where we have basically no community transmission in Queensland, our construction companies have continued, tomorrow be making an announcement down here on the Gold Coast, more jobs, people working, our mining has been able to continue, our small businesses have been able to continue, in South America, mining has been shut down, in the UK, businesses have been shut down. In Europe, tourism has been shut down. So, they’re the economies that are suffering far greater than Australia where we have been able to contain that virus. However, the international borders remain closed for tourists. And that is having a big impact on the Gold Coast here, it’s having a big impact in cancels up in Cairns – I speaking with tourism operators just recently – and in the Whitsunday, McKay region. And I’ve actually asked the Prime Minister to extend job keeper past the end of March, or have targeted assistance for those industries that are still going to feel the impacts of having international border shut. And I absolutely support having the international borders shut, but we need to recognize that some people’s businesses are impacted because of that.

Kerry O’Brien

What’s your sense of the likely response to that?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, that will be a no, but I think there will be some movement in terms of – I heard one of the Federal ministers say – they are looking at some targeted support. And we are also looking at what we can do as a government a little bit more to encourage tourism to certain destinations. So, my government’s working on it.

Kerry O’Brien

They’ll have to be looking for targets because it’s got to be an election year, federally.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, yes. Well, the Prime Minister has been very nice recently. So, you might be right there, Kerry.

Kerry O’Brien

So and but through all of this – I mean, we are still a long way from opening the borders to other countries, either for people or for produce. So, that is that is still a massive impediment to the return to a healthy economy for Australia. So given all of the kind of the intelligence that you’ve got, the economic intelligence as well as health, what is a reasonable expectation of when you might look ahead and when Australian business might look ahead to our international borders opening? Is that herd immunity a possibility, serious possibility that you are countenancing before the end of this year?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, international borders is Federal.

Kerry O’Brien

But you’ve got a big stake in it.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Yeah, I do have a big stake in it. But until we see countries that have vaccination that is widely accepted, and until we have more evidence about these other strains, I think the world is going to be still quite an uncertain place for the foreseeable future,

Kerry O’Brien

In terms of a reasonably free flow of imports coming into Australia, quite apart from the flow of people?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, even that, I mean, we are monitoring, and we do testing of our maritime workers coming in and out. We had issues where people were testing positive to COVID, who’ve been on small yachts coming in. These are all these are all issues like you’ve got your Pacific Islands where you could say, some of them are like your green zones at the moment where there’s no COVID, but you still have shipping going into those ports, you still have people sailing around. I mean, it’s very, very complex but hopefully with the vaccine rollout, and as it moves through other countries, and we get more and more evidence, well, then there might be more confidence that we can actually deal with certain countries. But I think that’s an issue that the Federal government needs to look at in the first place.

Kerry O’Brien

And I’m not wanting to share like the eternal Jeremiah through this conversation. But we are a long way from out of the woods, economically,

Annastacia Palaszczuk

We are and I absolutely agree with that, and that’s why governments have put in huge stimulus packages, we put in $11 billion. We’re targeting-

Kerry O’Brien

$11 billion?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

$11 Billion. We’re targeting specific industries as well. And I think you’re seeing a whole lot of infrastructure investment that’s happening across Australia, the likes of which, you know, we’ve never seen in our lifetime.

Kerry O’Brien

So, let’s jump ahead to this moment when we are kind of, we’re back into at the beginnings of a relatively smoothly running economy. I suspect a lot of people have forgotten that the national economy was close to recession anyway, before the pandemic struck, and at the heart of that struggling national rise, with stagnating wages, something even that fundamentally conservative institution the Reserve Bank tries to keep reminding us about today, and they have been doing for two years. On top of that no one knows what the impact will be when the Federal government turns off the Job Keeper tap, then there’s the mountain of debt and deficit that will put pressure on governments to keep spending tight. So, how does Queensland plan its way out of it with all of these impediments? And the stagnating wages as a for instance, is embedded in our system? No one’s really quite sure why it is like that. But workers’ wages simply are not growing and haven’t been growing for about four or five years.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Yeah, I think they’re all very important issues, and if I can put it in this context: so, before COVID hit, since my government was elected, I think we had grown around 250,000 jobs. So, we were getting to be in a really good position. International tourism was coming in, international students, the economy, our resources sector was booming. Our exports were record high. You know, we’d grown it from 40 billion to nearly 80 billion, and then COVID struck, and 200,000 jobs were lost. Well, now we’ve grown back those jobs. We’re now at 272,000 jobs. But we still recognize that there are industries that are hurting. So, what does government do? We need big stimulus, you need investment in job generating infrastructure, which is what we’re absolutely looking at with a $50 billion pipeline across the state. We have the most decentralized state. I need to make sure we’ve got hospitals and schools; we need to continue to grow. But, I think there is a huge appetite, that Queensland can come out of this quite strong, because it’s a safe place to invest because of our COVID response, but also to what we’re seeing, Kerry, is we’re seeing, you know, net migration to Queensland, from other states.

Kerry O’Brien

And you think that will keep coming?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think it will, well, why wouldn’t it? I mean, you only have to look around the Gold Coast. I mean, just it just driving into Broadbeach today, all of the cranes on the horizon. I mean, the construction industry here has not stopped. If you go to the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, around Brisbane, people are buying properties, there not even coming up for inspections. They’re actually buying them through Zoom call meetings. It is phenomenal and our stamp duty has gone up 17%.

Kerry O’Brien

I don’t know that you should boast about stamp duty, not when there are so many young people who can’t afford to buy their first home.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

We have a first home owners grant as well. So yeah, looking after those people.

Kerry O’Brien

Be careful what you wish for on the growth. Because in the in the previous growth spurt in in Southeast Queensland Labor governments weren’t able to keep up with the infrastructure. I remember that massive sudden spend on the freeways around Brisbane trying desperately to catch up.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, drive along M1, you’ll see a lot of work happening there. We’re going to be building a second M1, go up the Bruce highway, you’ll see a lot of construction happening all the way.

Kerry O’Brien

And schools and hospitals and all the other all the other things that go with it at a time when, as we come out of this, you’re going to have to start worrying about your budgets again, and while you’re talking about the need for great stimulus, there are going to be those worrywarts looking over your shoulder at the same time saying, “look at the size of your deficit, look at the size of debt”.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, we also have the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the head of Treasury saying now is the time to borrow, to invest in infrastructure, record low interest rates, now is the time to do it. And that is the message that they are sending to every state Premier and territory.

Kerry O’Brien

So, what is going to turbocharge your growth? And you need to start that turbocharge process soon, don’t you, rather than waiting for the herd immunity thing to happen and not knowing exactly to the extent to which Scott Morrison is going to keep that federal money flowing. What is going to turbocharge your economy? What is it that’s going to put the floor? And is it really just going to be public spending on infrastructure?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It’s not as public infrastructure, I think, I think Queensland is going to be really appealing to investors from around the world. A) it’s a safe place to invest, and b) people can actually work in this economy. People are not working in parts in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment. So, I think you’re gonna see a lot more investment attraction coming here to Queensland. But also too, you only have to look at what’s happening around the world at the moment, and a huge interest in hydrogen and I honestly believe that Queensland is at the forefront of being able to capitalize on a multi-billion-dollar hydrogen industry, which is what the economies of Japan and South Korea are hungry for.

Kerry O’Brien

Well, I’ll come back to that because I’m really interested to hear something more solid about that. So, I want to come to leadership now, what was the most difficult test of your leadership through the pandemic thus far?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, there were a few. I think that probably everybody attacking me, yelling at me, demanding that I do something that I knew was not the right thing to do and I stood my ground.

Kerry O’Brien

Was this about keeping a border open or not?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It was about keeping our border closed. And at a time when everyone was demanding it to be open, we could have had what Victoria experienced in terms of a second wave.

Kerry O’Brien

Now, I’m not I’m genuinely not being cynical here. But I do know that you can’t separate politics from policy. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not always looking for the right decision to make. But you could not have separated the politics from the policy in this last year, because it was an election year. And now, you and I both understand and you’re so steeped in the politics of this place that you would have understood the nature of Queenslanders dislike of being told what to do or bossed around from the South. And, and I’m sure that your gut instinct would have been that even if it was the right thing to do, it was also going to be the thing that was your pathway to an election victory, where otherwise you were facing defeat.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I reject that because honestly, to me, since the very day that we deemed to have a state of health emergency in Queensland, we were the first state to do that, it was always on about keeping Queenslander safe. Now I have parents in my 70s and at the time, my grandmother was alive as well and she was in a nursing home. And of course, the nursing homes was deemed as some of the most vulnerable and tragically, she passed away, middle of last year, and no one wants their family to suffer. And I have always prided myself in listening to expert advice. So, when we have droughts or floods or fires, I’ve always listened to the experts. And Dr. Young is perhaps the most seasoned Chief Health Officer in this country, she was around when the SARS pandemic was first started as well. And I will always listen to her advice. And that was her advice. And her advice was correct, because we saw what happened in Victoria.

Kerry O’Brien

But once you had decided to plot that path, and again, I’m not trying to reduce the achievements. But once you had decided to plot that path that made the process relatively easy, didn’t it? Because if you’re saying, I’m going to listen to the advice from this person, and the people behind her-

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, Kerry, there were many in my own party that didn’t agree with me.

Kerry O’Brien

How bad was that? I’m gonna say bad, how strong was that?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It wasn’t just one side of politics. There was a lot of sides of politics and a lot of people.

Kerry O’Brien

And how tough did that get?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It was very tough, but I stood my ground.

Kerry O’Brien

Was there a point in the caucus where – what was the breakdown in caucus? How many people in caucus disagreed with what you’re doing?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I’m not saying that there were verbal disagreements, but I am, I know that there were people who, in the party, in the bureaucracy, right across the board, that were concerned with the stand I was taking, and the impact that was having on industries. So, when you’re up against all that pressure from not just outside, but from within, and you stand your ground, and you get through it: at the end of the day, I’m very proud of where we are.

Kerry O’Brien

And just in terms of that internal battle in you, I guess, and trying to work out in your own mind which voices ultimately to listen to, and be influenced most by, what was the point where you actually breathe a sigh of relief and relaxed and thought I’ve got it right. I’ve gone the right way here.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I haven’t relaxed yet.

Kerry O’Brien

But you do you feel that you’ve gone the right way?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, look, we’re all here tonight. Yeah, we’re all sitting here tonight. In a nearly packed auditorium, you’ve been able to come up from northern NSW.

Kerry O’Brien

Yes, you allowed me to do that, yeah. There was a point where I wondered whether you’d let me across the border.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

But honestly, you know, I think Queenslanders value, their health, their family, having a job, and lifestyle. And we have all of that happening at the moment in our state.

Kerry O’Brien

But, at a certain point, in the course of last year, the internal polling that your party was no doubt taking through this process was telling you that politically, you had taken the right steps.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well-

Kerry O’Brien

Just say yes.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

No, no, no, that’s not absolutely correct. Because I can actually talk to people, and I will I travel a lot across Queensland. And I listen, I think I pride myself on that. And people were coming up to me, saying to me, thank you for keeping us safe. I get handwritten notes given to me at coffee shops. Thank you for keeping us safe. emails, personally hand-written made cards. You know, I think the public understands how important this is during a global pandemic.

Kerry O’Brien

And for once you reached across a political divide, didn’t you, when it suddenly showed up on election night that you were taking votes from One Nation, for heaven’s sake? What was that about? That was older people who had become traditional One Nation voters, saying thank you for keeping us safe, because we feel vulnerable. That was pretty much it, wasn’t it?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

But not only that, there were Liberal voters who have never voted Labor in their life. And they voted Labor for the very first time because we kept them safe.

Kerry O’Brien

And were they people of a certain age too?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Across the board.

Kerry O’Brien

So, the bottom line is that you have garnered a great deal of political capital as a result of that leadership and the perceptions of that leadership through the pandemic. So, what does a good leader do with that political capital with the numbers in a one house parliament and four years of guaranteed government? What do you do with that? What advantage are you going to take of that? Let’s just put the economy to one side.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

That’s the biggest challenge at the moment. Yep.

Kerry O’Brien

The rest of your agenda at the moment? The rest of your agenda? What are you going to do, that you can walk away with at the end of the four years, regardless of how the rest of the state reads it, and feel good about yourself?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, I think over the four years, we need to get as much through the pandemic as we possibly can, I can’t, I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t sit here and tell you all what’s going to happen in two or three- or four-year’s time. We have to just plan to the best of our capability. I’d like to see a more equal Queensland. I’ll give you this one example. This is something I looked at the other day, and I’ll just make some comments on it. So, I was standing the other day, at a press conference, there was myself, the Health Minister, the Police Commissioner, and we’re all standing there. And I looked around. And I thought to myself, it’s all women. And then I said to someone in my office, I said, “did you realize that press conference, I never thought I’d see the day where all the four people speaking at the press conference were women”. And he said, “I don’t even notice”. Because it’s become normal, because it’s become normal. And to have a cabinet, 50% when we were first elected, as well, I think we’re just one off at the moment, that if you add in our assistant ministry we are, we’ve got more women in our public service. And I think there’s, I think that sends a message that if you want to talk about equality, you’ve got to practice it. And I tell every young girl, including my nieces, be strong, be confident and have opportunity.

Kerry O’Brien

Now, that’s something that’s happening. And I must say, you reminded me of a conversation I had on stage with Julie Bishop not long after she stepped away from politics. And so, she was speaking rather candidly for the first time about this stuff. And she described how invisible and unheard she felt like in the Cabinet Room of the ministries she served in.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

But that is not in my cabinet. In my cabinet, everyone is equal. Everyone gets a say. It should be everywhere else, we’ve got 50% on our government boards, that it should become the norm every way. It’s reflective of society. What a lovely if that was in the Federal parliament.

Kerry O’Brien

What difference does it make do you think in terms of the quality of the outcomes?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Oh, much better outcomes. Much better. Very much across the detail as well, Kerry.

Kerry O’Brien

Tell me how you identify what that is? What is the quality of outcome that is different or better now as a result of there being more women with input to the process? And what is it? Are you’re able to pinpoint something that women bring to the table that men may be less inclined to or less able to?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, if we’re talking about equality, it’s about having all voices around the table. We also have our first indigenous minister, Leeanne Enoch, who sits around that table. I’d like to see more people from a multicultural background sitting around that table, you’ve got to have diversity, and you’ve got to have those voices there. Otherwise, the voices are unheard. Now, I go back to when I first joined COAG, I was the only woman. So you know, I went along to my when my first COAG meetings. And they made some comments about, oh, how does it feel to be the only chick? This was from a journalist. And, you know, which I thought was quite offensive.

Kerry O’Brien

I know that you’ve in the past, you’ve expressed concern, or observed rather pungently about, about the capacity of the media or the tendency in the media to report female politicians differently to male and I think one example you gave is, is how if, if male politicians are attending a meeting, it’s an important conference or it’s a summit. Women have dates. Women politician have dates.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, I’ll give you a good example. So Tony Abbott, had to catch up with Alan Jones. It was a powerful meeting,

Kerry O’Brien

A powerful meeting?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

A powerful meeting. I caught up with Alan Jones and we were on a date. That’s how the media portrayed it. Now everyone knows, that’s not possible. And just to just to comment on Julie Bishop-

Kerry O’Brien

You operate at various levels, don’t you?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Just on Julie Bishop, Julie Bishop left office, and I got along very well with Julie, I’ve met her a couple of times. And, and we had good conversations. And you know, she was a very effective Foreign Affairs Minister. And when she left, they talked about her shoes. Disgusting. And after that, I made a comment at a at an International Women’s Fay breakfast. And I said, it’s not the shoes you stand in, it’s what you stand for.

Kerry O’Brien

But what does that say? What does that say about how far we have come as a society, 50 years after the modern renascence of feminism? 50 years after the 70s feminist revolution, you’re still talking about that kind of stuff?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, that was the media commentating on that. But I think when you have more women involved in the political process, it actually changes the conversation. And when you were saying before, what are the outcomes of that? Well, you get much better outcomes. Because women are involved in all different aspects of society in life. And they bring that to the table. And they bring it with gusto as well. And all of the men who are on our cabinet table sit there on our cabinet table as well. They’re good men, and I want great outcomes as well. And you have robust conversations. And at the end of that day, in that meeting, we come out absolutely united in what we want to do for the people.

Kerry O’Brien

And you never you never see the sexist card around that table?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

No, I might have seen it in the past.

Kerry O’Brien

I thought you were going to say, “I might have seen it in the party room”.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

No, in the past. But I can remember clearly when I was a younger person, going to a meeting once and I was asked to leave a meeting and I looked around and I thought why am I being asked to leave this meeting? I was the only woman at that meeting. And I was singled out to leave that meeting.

Kerry O’Brien

How’d you handle that? You had to leave?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Made me stronger. Yeah. Well, it never happened again. And I got an apology.

Kerry O’Brien

I’m the one who can see the clock on the stage here. So I’m very conscious of time passing. And I want to try and keep it moving along. But what are the hallmarks of good leadership for you? And in terms of in laying that out, if you can give me a sense of the kinds of other leaders that might have influenced or helped shape your view of what good leadership is?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Okay. I think, so going back many years ago, and it’s a very good question, going back years ago, I suppose I couldn’t see many role models in the in Australia. So, when I went out to the US in 92, I was observing the Clinton campaign, and I met Dianne Feinstein, who was running for the Senate. And she did this debate and I thought, oh my goodness, if she can debate like this, perhaps one day I could do that. So, you cannot be what you cannot see. So, I saw that. Then years later-

Kerry O’Brien

But what was it about her that caught you?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It was just her boldness, the way she debated, and it was just two people standing on stage equally debating each other. So, I learned from that. Then met Bob Hawke, I think consensus sort of leadership. I really liked that. And I hope I put that into practice. And he was always out with the people. And I try to get out as much as possible and talk to people because if you’re listening, and you’re responding, I think that makes you a better leader. And then Wayne Goss, who’s no longer with us, I really admired him as a former Queensland Premier for his policy, depth and analysis.

Kerry O’Brien

The other side of that coin was, and he was the Labor leader who led Labor out of the Bjelke-Petersen wilderness. But he only lasted I think five years and he was marked down by the voters because I can remember covering that election-

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think it was just over six.

Kerry O’Brien

Was it? Okay. Perhaps I remember the election night better. But, but I do remember that local analysts were marking him down on arrogance. They were saying that he was being punished for perceptions of arrogance,

Annastacia Palaszczuk

But I think people may have had the wrong perception of him because I don’t think it was arrogant. I think he was actually quite shy. And it was his, just the way in which he interacted with people. If you’re shy, you might, then people might perceive that as being arrogant. So that’s just a commentary from me, because I knew him. And he was very pleasant. And when we were reduced to seven members after the election, where Campbell Newman won, I was trying not to mention his name for the whole night.

Kerry O’Brien

I think you should mention his name often because he did you an enormous favor. Who else would you have wanted to have as the head of government while you’re trying to come back from seven members?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

True, but you were only seven members and all the jokes were made about seven members. And I went and saw Wayne, and he sat down with me. And he sat there for an hour. And I remember walking into his office and just chatting with him. And he said to me, good luck. And I said, thanks. I still keep in contact with Roisin.

Kerry O’Brien

Okay. Of course, then there was Paul Keating, when you’re talking about when you’re talking about, about Bob Hawke, I mean, Bob Hawke was like, he had the common touch like nobody else. It was quite extraordinary to watch him at work. Paul Keating, on the other hand, said that while Bob was tripping over television cables in the shopping centers of Australia, building the political capital, he was spending it. And really, really, when you’re looking at the leadership of one, you’re looking at the leadership of both, aren’t you? Because they were a very important double act

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Absolutely a great team. And Paul Keating, like in the parliament would just tear up his opponents. But I think what Paul had a unique ability to do complex arguments and complex issues, to really explain that to people very clearly. So, whether you liked him or you didn’t like him, at least you understood exactly where he stood on the political spectrum on particular issues.

Kerry O’Brien

But, so, he would spend the capital was always important to him to do that he could see no point in garnering the chestnuts and hoarding them into a corner and then just waiting to build to win your next election and then hoarding the chestnuts and waiting to win the next election. In other words, to him, there was no point in being in government, unless you spent that political capital, where do you stand on that view? Of making your time count?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, absolutely, you got it, you got to stand up for what you believe in.

Kerry O’Brien

But it’s not just about winning elections, it’s about doing things.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

It’s about doing things. And I think, you know, the people of this state have put their trust in me. And they put their trust in me three times now. To do the best for them and their families. And that’s what I keep intending to do.

Kerry O’Brien

So, Dianne Feinstein, it’s interesting. You pulled her out of it, because I was a correspondent. I was about to say, young correspondent, but that’s not entirely true. I was a correspondent in, the United States, based in California, in fact, when Dianne Feinstein was mayor, and I reported on, really quite a pivotal moment in social policy globally, when Dianne Feinstein decided, as a mayor, to prohibit smoking in offices and in restaurants. And boy, did she go against the grain to do that? I mean, a lot of people responded to it. But she made enormous opposition on that. She put herself right out there. Have you had moments when you’ve put yourself right out there on a policy issue? I mean, really put yourself out on the edge?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, I think I did during the campaign where I said that, this time, we are going to tackle the issue of voluntary assisted dying. That’s a deeply personal issue for a lot of people. And it’s about time that Parliament took a vote on that. So that’ll be coming in during the middle half of this year for people to and I’ve come out publicly and said that I support it.

Kerry O’Brien

So, what prompted you to do that? Was there was there a personal element in this?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Yeah, there is absolutely, absolutely. A couple of things. So, the first thing was, many, many years ago, my grandfather passed away. He had a very sad passing with terminal cancer. And then when my grandmother departed, she was in pain at the end, but not for a long period of time. And I’ve been thinking about it, and people have been approaching me and talking to me about it as well. And it just firmed up in my mind that you really need to have control over what you want to do at the end of your life. It is a big ask of people but at the end of the day, it’s your decision. It’s a very personal decision. And I think we get in a situation where a lot of families sometimes don’t know what their loved one wants to do. And then my uncle tragically passed away last year, three to four months after my grandmother with terminal cancer, and he had a very slow and agonizing death.

Kerry O’Brien

What do you say to those who four out of strong religious conviction themselves would say, this is all part of God’s plan, that, that you can die with dignity while in pain, but your life should run its course.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

So we’ve also kind of put in, Kerry, over $170 million in improving palliative care services. So people can choose to die with dignity in their own homes as well, that extra support. But you know, I consider myself a Catholic, I consider myself a Christian. And, you know, I also had to make a decision earlier on too about for voting for in the last term on the termination of pregnancy, which I also supported, you know, probably 25 years after the US made that decision, which is pivotal, because no one should tell another woman what to do with her own body.

Kerry O’Brien

You’re conscious too that such is the feeling around that issue that you would never be able to relax, no legislator would, would ever be able to relax, once having felt that they had won the point and that what you’ve described is enshrined in law, because the resistance is never going to go away. I there will always be people who will want to turn that back.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

There may be people who want to. But I think what you’ll find and what we found with the termination of pregnancy bill, it had support from members across the political divide. And I think you’ll find with ending, dying with dignity, I think you’ll actually find, too, that there’ll be people across the political spectrum. And I think when you have that it’s less polarizing.

Kerry O’Brien

Very briefly, you haven’t mentioned Peter Beattie, amongst your favorite leaders. But in electoral terms, he was very successful for a long time. And I’ve heard his approach described by former staff as being make a big deal publicly over bread-and-butter decisions like say more police stations or more new schools, while implementing policies that might be less popular with a socially conservative state with as little fanfare as possible. Does that resonate with you?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, look, I used to work in Peter Beattie’s government, so I’m not going to criticize and look, he did a great job as premier. And also, he did a great job in helping to deliver the Commonwealth Games, which was here on the Gold Coast. So I have nothing but respect for Peter in the work that he’s done for Queensland.

Kerry O’Brien

I wasn’t really implying otherwise. But perhaps it was just minor mischief on my part. But I was really what I was really interested in was that was the proposition that the style of the Beattie style was to play up the populist issues well, essentially not sneaking through. But while essentially underplaying the issues that he knew might strike a bad chord with socially conservative Queensland, is that the kind of game you have to play in a state that is perceived to be socially conservative?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, I might give you an example of something that was put in the too hard basket in the Beattie government and something that we did. So this was the issue of taking 17-year-olds out of the adult corrective system. Every other state and territory had done it, Queensland was the last one to do it. Why didn’t Queensland do it? Every single time the bureaucracy would say it’s too much money, it’s too much money, it’s too much money. But it was a breach of international human rights. So, it took a courageous government to actually make that decision and do it. But not only did we do that, we also put $550 million into our youth justice system as well. Now that’s going to roll out over four years. We’re starting to see some early results of that. We’re not going to see all of it at once. But, it’s the largest injection that has been put into youth justice, in the generation.

Kerry O’Brien

And when we’re talking about youth justice, we’re predominantly talking about indigenous youth justice. And we know, we know how much the deck is stacked against Indigenous Australians broadly, including indigenous youth inside the justice system. And you saw, oh, Mick Gooda’s response overnight to your reaction yesterday to the latest pressure on youth crime, I think particularly in Townsville, but not just confined to Townsville. And he described it as a knee jerk reaction. He said he wasn’t turning his back on the problem. But he was saying it was a knee jerk reaction, and that kind of punishment. In the end doesn’t work. But you’ve got to find other ways.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

And we are finding other ways. So, we announced some tough and strong measures about the 10% that the police are advising us that are committing the majority of the offenses. In the 90%, we are starting to see good results.

Kerry O’Brien

First offenders?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

If you get in early and prevented, you’re going to stop the repeat offending. So, we had an example out of Mount Isa, where a young girl who was offending went and did some programs: we got her into I think was numeracy and literacy programs, and had a mentor, got some mental health assistance, hasn’t reoffended since January last year. We’ve got on country programs. This is really important because what the elders were saying to me, is that we want to take our young kids, and we want to, we want them to understand country, we want them to go on to go onto our land, and we want to spend time with them, and tell them about our history and our culture. And we’ve had 73 people go through that program and very, very few have really offended. So we need to do more of that. We need more support for people and sometimes its lack of diagnosis of mental health. It is a very complex situation. But that money we’ve put aside there that $550 million is going to a whole different programs right across the state, which we are confident that we will see that youth crime decrease from that age group.

Kerry O’Brien

Since we’re talking indigenous issues, you know, my interest in yes in in what you’re going to do with the Pathway to Treaties, recommendations that went to the Parliament in which were embraced by your government. And this is, for a whole set of steps, essentially, to reconcile with indigenous Queenslanders for a dreadful past. Whatever good things have come from the past the horrors of the history of colonial times, particularly in Queensland, I would be there to stick my neck out and say as bad as anywhere else in Australia and worse than many other areas. How important a priority is it for you to follow that process to actually establish an institute, to actually establish a truth telling process. to establish a genuine pathway, not just to a treaty, but quite possibly treaties? And how importantly, do you embrace or how energetically do you embrace the concept of a voice to a state Parliament? Not necessarily enshrined in the constitution here, but a genuine voice to Parliament, which is a part of the review process of policy that might affect indigenous issues?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Alright, well, this is something I’m very passionate about. So, I’m happy to elaborate a little bit on that. So, first of all, in terms of voices, we have three very strong voices in our party and in the government. We’ve got Leeanne Enoch, who is a minister, and a very, very good minister. We’ve got Lance, who’s been elected for Bundamba. And we have the first ever Torres Strait Islander person elected to the Queensland parliament and Cynthia Lui.

Kerry O’Brien

But let me very quickly – they’re up there, these people will come and go, what we’re talking about is permanent, a permanent structure that can’t shift, a permanent structure that becomes a big part of the future of Queensland and changes the story.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, that’s a conversation the whole nation needs to have.

Kerry O’Brien

But all the states in the end will be the implementers and this is your opportunity. I would have thought.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, can we talk about treaty. So in terms of treaty, this is absolutely fundamental. I think we have to acknowledge the past, we have to do truth telling, I’ve just signed off on the committee that will be traveling around the state where people can come forward and tell their stories about what happened. And the history of Queensland, the history of Australia, it’s not a pretty history. People, indigenous people had their wages stolen. They were not paid. And they helped contribute to building our state. We put in $21 million to pay back those some of those stolen wages. And there was a court case where I think was around $160 million. Then we need to acknowledge that there were massacres that happened, that our country was invaded, and I think we need to be a lot stronger in telling that history in our schools.

Kerry O’Brien

How much of the history have you read yourself? As a personal thing? I mean, what do you now have the role of the native police in exterminating indigenous people in the second half of the 19th century? And have you, are you across the work of Lyndall Ryan at Newcastle University in the map of massacres that she’s been building assiduously over the last few years? Are you right into that story yourself?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, Kerry, I was in the British Library when I was doing my Master’s, many years ago. And it took me to be seated in the British Library, reading a court case about the Myall Creek massacre in northern New South Wales. Now, back then, the squatters wanted to get the land, and they were able to get the land if there was deemed to be no one living on that land. So, people were rounded up, and they were killed, and they were massacred. And back then, at the time – I was horrified to be reading all of this detail – and in fact, it was the British government back then, the Colonial Office, who was actually telling people here in, in Australia, that there should be a treaty with people, and are absolutely horrified that the people who were deemed to have done this were let off. And to read this in in the British Library was just unbelievable. And when I first met Chris Sara he came in to my office, and he was talking to me about a treaty. And this was very early-

Kerry O’Brien

Chris was the head of the Indigenous Affairs Department.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Who now I’ve appointed as head of the – yeah exactly. And I value his input and the work that he is doing. But also what we’re doing is we’re actually, my ministers go out to indigenous communities with their Director General. And they listen to their concerns, and they respond to them. And we were, and we also meet with the mayor’s once every six months as well, to listen to their concern.

Kerry O’Brien

I’m not an expert on this at all. But I have a sense that the education, our indigenous history, and culture and tradition, through the various services, like health and the justice system, is piecemeal. I’m not just talking about Queensland, I’m talking generally. And yet those that kind of education process is fundamental, because they are the frontline of services of delivery of services to indigenous people, indigenous communities, and it is the police who are the frontline of the justice system. And you just have a sense that there are so many police still, who have no sense of the injustices that have gone before them, as they are a part of a system which is still locking an obscene number of indigenous people up in this country. Are you confident that you have those processes in place in this state? And if you don’t, that you will make sure that they are?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think we’re we are growing the competency. My understanding is that first year constables training actually does include conversations,

Kerry O’Brien

But how much? Is it a week?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

You know, there always needs to be more, but I think we also need more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as part of our police force. I think at the moment, it’s about 2%. That needs to be more. We’ve got about 160 or 130 police liaison officers. But absolutely, there needs to be an understanding and you know, as a nation, we need to do more. As a nation, we need to have constitutional recognition. That’s step one. If you’re going to unite our country, you have to bring everyone together, you can’t, you can’t go down the next path unless everyone’s united.

Kerry O’Brien

Don’t depress me. With the time that’s left, the brief time that’s left, we don’t really have any actually, but I cannot let climate change go unmentioned and, and in terms of leadership, you’ve set a target to cut carbon emissions by quote unquote, at least 30% by 2030. Now, there’s nothing particularly ambitious about that is there because and even if you achieve that, even if you achieve that, for a start the most credible climate change scientists on the planet are clearly saying that 30% Paris targets are way short of what’s required to limit temperatures to the targets they’re talking about, even 2%. Some are predicting that we’ll get to 1.5% Celsius increase in temperature in four years. Now, you trusted the experts on the pandemic, and you’ve talked about what a great outcome that was, you’ve said that you’ve made a point of trusting your experience. If you actually opened your ears and your eyes to all of the experts amongst the climate science, surely you would be doing more than you’re doing in Queensland, one of the great emitters and one of the great exporters of a nation.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, climate change is real, it’s happening. You don’t need to go to the Pacific Islands. I’ve been up to some of the Torres Strait islands, where we’re building sea walls because of what’s happening. I’ve been there personally, I’ve sat down with people, I’m investing, because it is it is unimaginable to me that our islands are facing, you know, a global problem. It’d be good if we had a Federal government that was prepared to take action.

Kerry O’Brien

But let’s just talk about what you can do. Not the other states are doing. New South Wales, a conservative state, the Environment Minister there has got a 35% target for 2030. You’ve got a 30% target. Victoria, the committee that they empowered to tell them what their targets should be came back with the with the target of 45 to 60%. By 2030, you’re 30%?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Yeah, we’ve got 50% renewable energy target by 2030. Before we came to office, we had 7%, renewable energy in six years, went out 20%. And we will get to our 30%.

Kerry O’Brien

Can you do better, do you think, than 30%? Cut in emissions by 2030?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well, we’re going to have to do everything we possibly can. We are.

Kerry O’Brien

Why can’t you do better than a 30% cut? Why can’t you go hard for something better than that? Is it political? That that the that the mining industry and that those who are opposed and some of whom still don’t believe in the climate science, is their voice too strong?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

No, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I mean, we have we are, as I said, I think where I started off earlier talking about hydrogen, we know that the world is looking for alternative uses, and a hydrogen is clearly a part of that. And Queensland has the opportunity as the Sunshine State to export our sunshine to the rest of the world.

Kerry O’Brien

I mean we’ve got more sunshine than Victorians. It’s not like we’ve got a monopoly on sunshine. Why is that a particular Queensland thing?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Why is it a particular Queensland thing?

Kerry O’Brien

Why would hydrogen, not exclusively, but why is it more attractive in Queensland than, say the top half of New South Wales which would get as much sun as you get in the bottom half of Queensland? I would have thought.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Because no, because we’re getting investors that are coming here wanting to set up. Okay, so-

Kerry O’Brien

While other investors are pulling out in terms of the fossil fuels, broadly in Australia, and Queensland is being targeted. That’s the last time I’ll interrupt.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Okay we have coal, we have gas, and we have renewables. Right. So, we have all three, we have the youngest coal fired power fleet in the nation. We have gas, and now we have a very large investment in renewables and a lot of that is private investment. We’ve also set up CleanCo, a renewable energy company, which the government has set up. So, we are actually absolutely working on making sure that we are addressing fundamental issues of climate change.

Kerry O’Brien

But do you believe the great mass of climate scientists who tell you we don’t even have the time that you’re planning on? We do not have that time, we just don’t. There are those who believe we are going to reach a tipping point beyond which there is no real return. I mean, do you accept this as a genuine existential threat?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Oh, absolutely. Of course I do. I mean, I mean, who doesn’t? I mean, who were here in the audience does not believe in climate change?

Kerry O’Brien

That’s not the question. It’s about how far you have to go to actually deal with.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

We are going as fast as we possibly can. I mean, we have got $15 billion of investment happening in Queensland, on the books and happening, wind farms that weren’t here six years ago, solar farms that weren’t here six years ago, and people wanting to invest in the new economy minerals, in the northwest minerals province, the things such as batteries and storage. I mean, we’ve got the resources here to do the manufacture as well. And as you see, over the next 20 or 30 years, sorry, the next 20 years with the phase out of some motor vehicles in terms of they’ll now be electric or hydrogen, we are at the forefront, and we can benefit from that.

Kerry O’Brien

So many other things I wanted to talk to you about tonight, Anastasia, but I’m going to go to the end. A good leader should also know when it’s time to go. And our political history is littered with the bones of leaders who stayed too long. I know you’re a long way away from that: very few walk away of their own volition. How will you know, ultimately, when it’s time to go?

Annastacia Palaszczuk

We’ve just had an election, Kerry.

Kerry O’Brien

But it’s an important it’s an interesting point, isn’t it? I mean, any look, you could be here for another eight or nine or 10 years.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I’ll be here as long as the people of Queensland want me to be? Yeah. And I’ll know.

Kerry O’Brien

Fair enough. And you’ll still be young as leaders go when this term means.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Well 50 is the new 30, isn’t it?

Kerry O’Brien

75 is the new 72. At the end of the day, what’s more important how long you’ve held on to power or an enduring legacy to leave behind.

Annastacia Palaszczuk

I think it’s about the people. And it’s what I can do. And I can only do it to the best of my ability. What you see is what you get.

Kerry O’Brien

They seem to like it so far. Anastasia Palaszczuk, so thank you very much.

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In Conversation with Professor Nigel McMillan, Dr Rebecca Huntley and Mik Auckland

Post author By Julie Blakey
Post date 4 June 2021

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After the Pandemic: Imagining the Future

Our response to coronavirus will shape Australia for decades to come. It has been the catalyst for major change. For many people, their lives at work and at home have been irrevocably altered. Whole industries were severely impacted. Structural weaknesses in our society have been exposed. But we have also re-discovered what we are capable of when we work together. A new appreciation of what we can expect from government, civil society and each other has emerged. We looked ahead and imagined what Australia might look like as we recover from this pandemic.

Play Video

Professor Carolyn Evans, Vice Chancellor and President, Griffith University

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to HOTA, Home of the Arts here on the magnificent Gold Coast. My name is Carolyn Evans. I’m the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University, which is proud to be the cohost of this event, alongside our partner, HOTA. I begin by respectfully acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet today and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here with us. And for those of you joining us virtually, I recognize that traditional custodians across the many lands on which you are gathered. Could I also acknowledge Councillors of the Gold Coast City Council, William Owen-Jones and Glenn Tozer; Professor Emeritus Ned Pankhurst, Chair of the Board of Directors; Ms. Criena Gehrke, CEO of HOTA; and many other distinguished friends and guests who are here with us tonight. It’s such a pleasure to welcome you to the fifth in our event, Creating a Future for All series of conversations. The final event for 2020 we’re proud to once again be joined by master interviewer, Kerry O’Brien. Kerry has very clearly stamped his mark on this series of conversations. His unique style has brought out thought-provoking insights from our guests. So, we decided for the last time in 2020, we better challenge him a little, I asked him to facilitate a discussion with not one guest as we had previously, but three. It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is still of course top of mind for all of us. But what is increasingly clear is that people want to talk about the immediate – what is happening now, what are the challenges now – but also look beyond the threats and begin to consider the uncertainties, the complexities, and the promises of an unknown future. The questions we want to tackle tonight are sufficiently challenging that we brought three outstanding panel members to help cover them. The first joining us via the video link is Dr. Rebecca Huntley, an Australian social researcher and expert on social trends. She is an author and researcher who has been a regular columnist for The Business Review Weekly, a feature writer for Vogue and a radio presenter for Radio National. She regularly features on radio and TV. Also joining us here is Mr. Mick Auckland, who is the director of programming and presenting service with our value partner, HOTA. He’s a highly experienced senior leader at the major international events. He was the divisional head involved in the delivery of four ceremonies of the London 2020, yes, sorry, 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and was Head of Ceremony, Arts and Culture for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. And finally, Professor Nigel McMillan, a cancer biologist whose research has focused on viral causes of cancer. He’s deputy Head of the School of Medical Science, and program director in the Menzies Health Institute Queensland here at Griffith University, leading a team of 200 researchers here on the Gold Coast. Many of you though will know Nigel from his many television and radio appearances throughout COVID-19, having become one of Australia’s leading and most trusted voices on health aspects of the pandemic. As this is the last in conversation for 2020, could I take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody who has worked so hard to make the first five conversations a success, including my own great team at Griffith, particularly Philip, Julieanne, Nick, Mark, and Julie, and our wonderful colleagues at HOTA , with whom we’re looking forward to continuing this series in 2021. And so, for the last time in 2020, it’s my pleasure to hand over to Kerry to start the conversation.

Kerry O’Brien: The world has been living in a very real state of crisis for the best part of this year now, the extent of which was unthinkable until it happened. And today’s panel brings together three critical community voices reflecting science and medicine, arts and culture, and social and economic behavior to take stock of the world’s worst pandemic in a century, as it heads into the northern winter, how dramatically we reacted to it, what we’ve learned about ourselves and what’s to come. The timing of the virus has been truly remarkable, coinciding with a digital world of dramatic change and few certainties, great instability, polarization, and shaky democracy, where the very nature of truth has been systematically undermined, so not much to talk about. Nigel McMillan, things are okay in Australia at the moment. But the northern hemisphere is entering a winter from hell. With third waves threatening, which means none of us around The Woods until we have an effective vaccine. So, I’d like to start by getting the clearest possible picture of where we stand, with the three vaccines currently being touted. What do we know? And what more do we still need to know about whether those vaccines will in the pandemic?

Professor Nigel McMillan: Well, Kerry, 12 months ago, we knew nothing. We knew absolutely nothing about this particular virus. And in the short 11, and a bit months that we’ve been exposed to it, we’ve gone from that lack of knowledge to three vaccines, which are basically now finished human trials. And we’re starting to hear reports about the initial results, which suggests all three of them, the Moderna, the Pfizer, and the Oxford vaccine all seem to work fairly well in terms of preventing disease, and preventing infection, some a little better than others. And so, this gives us great hope that we will be able to get the vaccine out to people. Now what is that going to look like? These vaccines, we’re going to have a rather rushed approval process. But it’ll still be a thorough approval process through the TGA in Australia. And we’ll get that vaccine out to people, I believe in January, I think in America, they’re looking at it December.

O’Brien: You mean they’ll start getting it out.

McMillan: They’ll start getting it out. But we really won’t have that rollout, a full rollout until probably mid-year. And I think by the end of 2021, everyone who wants a vaccine should probably be able to get a vaccine. But this next year, I think it’s going to be a bit messy in terms of the logistics of getting these vaccines out, there’s going to be an interesting, interesting international game in terms of who’s at the front of the queue, and who’s second, and third. Many governments have invested a lot of money in these vaccines and pre bought them, it’s not clear how that distribution is going to occur. And so, by the end of 2021, Australia will be, I think, in a position to start becoming normal again. But I think we’re going to be playing that waiting game of trying to get the population vaccinated in the next 12 months.

O’Brien: So, two of these three vaccines require intense cold, don’t they? So, paint the picture of how they’re actually loaded and transported from the other side of the globe to Australia.

McMillan: So many things have changed in this pandemic, things that we didn’t think were possible, are possible. And one of those is the technology that two of these vaccines use. So, these are called mRNA vaccines. This is a brand-new technology that has never been in a vaccine before. Now mRNA is essentially a genetic instruction to the cell to make a protein. And it’s quite unstable, and it’s actually deliberately unstable because we don’t want them hanging around a long time. That means we have to store them at very cold temperatures. So, the vaccine from Pfizer, which essentially seems to be the front runner right now needs a temperature of minus 80 degrees. Now, in my laboratory, I have minus 80 freezes, most hospitals have minus 80 freezes. This is the temperature of dry ice, the Moderna vaccine claims to only need minus 20. So, that’s your household fridge freezer, you know, to sit in the freezer, that poses challenges is to actually getting this out through the cold chain to hospitals, GPs don’t have minus 80 clinics. So, how are we going to actually get this vaccine out to people? I suspect that every COVID clinic or hospital will become a COVID vaccine clinic and that’s the way they’ll do it. To be fair, Pfizer have taken on the responsibility of actually managing that cold chain for the government. And so, they feel that’s a problem solved, I suspect.

O’Brien: So they’ll be packing planes, over in America, they’ll be packing planes with dry ice.

McMillan: So, there’s a big plant in American and there’s a big plant in Germany, and they’ll be filling these big planes with big buckets of dry ice with thousands of vials of vaccine and flying them directly to us and all over the world.

O’Brien: Now you’ve actually used that same process with flying drugs to Australia. How well is that gone?

McMillan: Yeah, it’s a bit of a hit and miss process in my own experience. So, we often get materials, research materials, over from Europe and America. About half of our boxes arrive without any dry ice in them anymore. You might say that our customs officials are quite efficient. And sometimes we have a hold up there with paperwork. But it’s not a trivial process. Dry ice is very heavy too. And of course, you you’ve got a plane full of co2. So, there’s it’s not the safest thing to be doing in some ways. So this is not a trivial exercise.

O’Brien: We know what’s claimed from the tests so far, up to 90 or 95% effective, which is way more efficient than the flu vaccines that we use. Do we know yet whether one – not one dose because I know – is true for all three of them that you need to do two doses and will that mean that if it works the first time that you are likely then to be immunized into the indefinite future?

McMillan: This is a an incredibly important question for vaccines. And so, we know from people who are naturally infected with normal human coronaviruses, their immunity doesn’t last, we get infected with them each year. With COVID-19 virus or the virus that causes COVID-19, we’re now seeing, in fact as recently as this last week, papers suggesting that immunity is in fact, a lot longer lasting than normal. So, we have an expectation that the vaccine is going to be much better than that. So, my expectation of the vaccines right now, and only time will tell, is that they would last at least three years. And really, after that, we’ll have to see if it wanes and we need a booster. Now, we need tetanus boosters every five to 10 years – flu, we vaccinate for every year. But that’s for a different reason, because it changes.

O’Brien: But the key with this one is to have that first impact that stops the pandemic and gets us back to some sense of normality, by which time hopefully, we can then control the process. So, of course, we’re not just depending on fixing up our own situation, we are hugely reliant at the bottom of the world, on all these other countries that have been savagely hit also getting it under control. And when you look at the madness in the United States, you really wonder how long it’s going to take. Where 200,000 cases are emerging, new cases are emerging every day.

McMillan: The United States right now is on a path that will lead them to around 450,000 deaths. Now that the same number of soldiers they lost in World War Two. And that’s incredible. UK right now are on a path, one in 1000 people in the UK have died from COVID virus. 55,000 deaths. So, they’re in a terrible space. And of course, the United States has a very sort of an independent streak. So, the question is, what’s the vaccine uptake going to be like in the United States? This is right, this is a worldwide problem. This virus is now everywhere, and we’re not getting rid of it. And if one country chooses not to vaccinate, then we’re going to have to ring-fence Australia around. And I would suggest that a condition of entry to Australia will be vaccination for this disease, that would be a sensible decision for our government to make. To allow us to keep being part of the world.

O’Brien: So, an interesting conundrum, isn’t it? But on the one hand, Scott Morrison may be able to enforce a vaccine, a compulsory vaccination for people coming into Australia, which he couldn’t enforce within Australia.

McMillan: I think that when we think about within Australia, is there a need for us to vaccinate everyone? There actually isn’t. If we vaccinate our oldest population, or older people, our most vulnerable people, diabetics and the like, we will eliminate deaths: all the deaths are in those particular groups. Now, we would really like about 70% of the population to be vaccinated. This will stop the virus circulating around and affecting those people who can’t get vaccinated. So, we have, we have some people who just can’t be vaccinated. And of course, older people, their immune systems eventually wear out and vaccines don’t work anyway. Now, we don’t need 100% of people to be vaccinated. So, we can, I think from an infectious diseases point of view, that’s okay.

O’Brien: Given the battering that scientists have taken trying to convince the world to do something about climate change, you as a scientist must have been somewhat reassured, on the one hand, there say political leaders relying so openly on their health experts to guide their fight against the virus. Yet on the other hand, you see Anthony Fauci, who became Donald Trump’s kicking boy, but won wide respect across America threatened amongst other things with the decapitation for speaking truth to his country.

McMillan: Yeah, there’s a huge debate about what is truth. And someone like Anthony Fauci, who is who’s gone through the AIDS pandemic, or the AIDS epidemic at the time, provided a wonderful leadership to his country over many, many years, roundly abused and not believed. You know, if Anthony Fauci was in Australia, he’d be a hero. You know, you look at each state looking to their Chief Health Officers and buying into the advice. I think the reason Australia is in such a great position is because we bought into that advice and the public bought into the program. And that’s why we enjoy the freedoms that we have today. But you raise a much larger issue and that is, you know, who decides what truth is in terms of science and scientists are generally very careful people, where we will never tell you absolutely that this is the way things are, we can never prove anything 100% of the time. We’ve gone through this, 500 years of scientific philosophy, you know, tells us that you can’t prove something absolutely 100% but this of course, doesn’t play well in our 24-hour media landscape, clickbait headlines, etc. Where they only want one fact and the truth and we can’t give it to them.

O’Brien: Mind you, if I had if I had 96 aeronautical, top aeronautical engineers, telling me not to climb on a plane and four others telling me not to, guess which I would do? But Fauci says that even though he believes all Americans should be wearing masks, he’s hesitant to call for a national mask mandate, heading into such a bleak winter ahead, because Americans don’t like being told what to do. It’s not just Americans either, is it? What does that say about the limitations of modern leadership, even paralysis, if you aren’t confident enough, of a leader in such a crisis, to be able to bring people with you?

McMillan: There’s an enormous East-West divide here isn’t there? If you looked in the Pacific Ocean, and if you look at everything east, America and Europe, and you look at the situation there and compare that to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China. It’s black and white. The populations of those countries, some of them authoritarian, most of them democratic, those countries have bought into what their government believes. In Europe, they’re suffer from a few issues around land borders, but it’s this selfish “me too” generation in a sense, where it’s all about me. And I’m, you know, I’m not buying into helping others. Now, that’s not everyone, of course. But then there is this sort of American stubbornness around how their country is formed. And it’s, you know, my way or the highway and this ration dependence in some ways, that’s got them in trouble, let alone their healthcare system, which they touted as the best in the world, which has abjectly failed them in this particular pandemic, because their lack of a good decent public health system, and the absence of that has led to many of the problems that they have now.

O’Brien I’m going to come back and I’ve got many more interesting questions to pursue with you, Nigel, but I’m going to bring Rebecca Huntley in now. And as a professional observer of people’s behavior and social trends, how do you reflect, Rebecca, on an extraordinary year overlaid on an extraordinary period of history, because although governments knew a pandemic would come at some point, no one foresaw how far reaching the social, political and economic impacts would be.

Dr Rebecca Huntley: Yes, that’s true. And I’ve had a few of my friends observed that I must be loving the pandemic as an example of what human beings can do under stress, that there’s so much that you can absorb and kind of an observed about Australian society when we have been under kind of both a summer of bushfires, and then very little respite before we headed into a pandemic. Just listening to Nigel speak then, I think in terms of what has positioned Australia well through this pandemic, I think one of the things that has helped us – leadership has been part of it but it hasn’t been at all – of Australians are, and have always been extraordinarily good at following orders. And they like rules. And as a result, when a crisis happens, we often pull together and we don’t get too hung up on things like, you know, the freedom to die from a virus. And that’s actually quite a positive thing. I mean, going to that point that you made about making masks mandatory, there’s a lot of work that’s done in different kinds of cultures, to say, the extent to which you need to make things always mandatory, or whether you need to get a critical mass of people doing stuff and the sheer fact that everybody is doing forces most other people to do it. If you actually say everybody has to wear something, what you what you can sometimes create is a minority backlash, that can do a lot of damage. And in some ways, we’ve seen that with immunization in Australia, even though immunization generally is widely supported by the community, there is a destructive, hardcore group of people who are anti-vaccination, I’m really concerned about the damage that they can do when we do have a vaccine available for COVID. And we’ve seen the role that they can play with climate denial, particularly if they happen to be in Federal Parliament, or in possession of significant media outlets. So, you know, it has been an extraordinary year for all those reasons to see, I suppose, the Australian character laid bare and the strengths and weaknesses of our society either amplified, amplified in various ways.

O’Brien: So, what have been the big patterns that have emerged for you?

Huntley: Look, I think the first pattern – and this is fascinating – is that in the initial stages of the pandemic, there was an uptick of trust in leadership of all kinds.

O’Brien: Off a very low base.

Huntley: Off a very low base. But you know, we take it where we can get it, because one of the things that has been concerning me over 15 years of research on Australians is just this deepening cynicism and disengagement from politics. Not people necessarily not voting, not necessarily people not voting formally or thinking that democracy should be checked out. But this increasing disengagement, these siloed and corrosive conversations. And this almost at you know, overhyped cynicism about our institutions. And it’s, it’s worried me greatly in terms of how are we going to navigate the many crises that we face, not just the pandemic, but climate change, rising social and economic inequality, if we are losing faith in the institutions that can actually shape the solutions for those kinds of things. So, you know, initially in the pandemic, it was interesting to see, we almost instinctively as humans turn to our leaders at a time of crisis. And we were, we were kind of following our rules, and we were kind of, you know, knuckling down to lock down. What always interested me ongoing is how long we were going to sustain that. And when we were going to start pointing fingers, and when we were also going to start a bit who was to blame. So there was, we saw it in terms of increasing racism towards Chinese Australians. We saw it at different times, you know, some really ageist narratives around young people being super spreaders or the only people dying from COVID are people over 75, so it’s okay. You know, so I suppose ongoing with, again, started to see those, the kind of the thin lines of social cohesion start to become thinner. And as we go into next year, when all the economists say will actually be far worse than this year for Australia, it will then be interesting to see how whether we start to see different kinds of governments different political persuasions manage that as well as they’ve done this year, when people’s, I suppose patience, for sacrifice starts to wear thin.

O’Brien: Were you surprised by the extent to which state tribalism kicked in? I mean, on the one hand, we had this, at least veneer – and I think real and in the early stages – sense of national unity through the hastily put together National Cabinet but Queensland became a target from New South Wales, and I did have a quiet – despite the overwhelming seriousness of the situation – I did have it as a Queenslander, I did have acquired chortle at the idea that Southern people might think that Queenslanders would be alarmed that they were angry with Queensland in the south. They were delighted by it at one level, but there was the stoush from outside Victoria. So, there was a brittleness, but there was also a tribalism wasn’t there? Again, I mean, you saw it in the Queensland election, and I suspect you’re going to see it early next year in the Western Australian election, were they talking about a landslide for the incumbent government.

Huntley: No, I think that’s right. And again, we see – and whether this is Australian, or whether this is human – our tendency to knuckle down and turn inwards at times of crises. You know, in some ways, I think the other thing that’s happened this year, which has been fascinating, is the extent to which state governments have been competing with each other in the Race to the Top on renewables. Every state wants to be, you know, the renewable superpower state. I always had this theory that because of the recalcitrance of the Federal government and the conservative Federal government on climate change, what we needed the states vying against each other for best possible renewable project. We’re starting to see that tribalism doesn’t surprise me, you know, and as somebody who has families from Northern Queensland, when we talk about the south, we mean Brisbane intra state tribalism. Yeah, um, I think that might be one of those things that that is reasonably short-lived and something that won’t last beyond, much beyond the pandemic, and is in many ways in the same way as we kind of turn to our leaders in a relatively uncritical way at a time of crisis, just how we respond when something so again, yes, predictable, but, you know, unfathomable at the same time for most people happens.

O’Brien: Just briefly, in one of our early conversations for the series. ACTU leader, Sally McManus, talked about the fault lines that the pandemic had exposed in our society. What fault lines would you identify and, in particular fault lines that perhaps we weren’t all paying all that much attention to is a within our own society?

McMillan: Well, at the beginning of the pandemic, I did a conversation at ANU, and I said, at this very moment, other than healthcare professionals, the most valuable person in this society is somebody who cleans a nursing home or a hospital. And they are almost certainly a woman who is on a very, very uncertain wage, probably from non-Anglo backgrounds. And the real fault line and the things that the major parties have not got their head around is who is the actual working class in Australia, who are the majority, you know, who are the people who are providing essential services at times of crisis, who we do value. And so, Sally would talk very kind of articulately about that. But I think that is one critical one. And that’s an intersection of, you know, race, gender, and where you sit in the economy. And those people are at the bottom of the pile in so many ways, but we rely on them so extraordinarily.

O’Brien: I wondered about the genuineness of and it wasn’t just any one leader. I mean, every state and federal leader was constantly thinking, health and other frontline workers and yet, and yet in the middle of all of those effusive “thank yous”, I noticed in one state at least, that they imposed a wage freeze on those same public workers. If I was going to be mean about it , I would say that it smacked of hypocrisy.

McMillan: No, it does. I think it’s very easy to congratulate people and thank them. And then there’s another thing to say, well, what are we actually going to do to ensure that they have safe, secure work, and if they get unwell, they feel safe enough to go and get a COVID test and self-isolate for two weeks because it won’t economically ruin them. So that is absolutely true? Mik Auckland, how has the pandemic affected the arts, from your perspective?

Mik Auckland: It depends on where you live. But as a holistic view worldwide, and probably in Australia, it’s pretty much decimated the arts. The art relies very much on micro businesses, micro economies is a huge, if you think of it as a pyramid, is a huge base of one and two main operations, people who run a truck, or run a prop shop, or make feathers for hats, who have no work, and who may leave the arts industry, and who the big players at the top of the tree rely on to generate the product that they then sell market, put on-stage, put-on film, paint, deliver in museums. So the industry is being devastated. I think there was a report a long time ago, right at the start, that talked about industries that were a V curve or a U curve and in the case of the arts and tourism, an L curve. And the L curve was structural damage. There is not a quick bounce back. And I don’t think there will be a quick bounce back.

O’Brien: And given the very nature that you described, you know, they’re the big companies, and they’re the spectacular kinds of programs. But I would imagine that that a lot of the impact on those small operations would be very well hidden when it comes to trying to measure the damage.

Auckland: It’s hidden in terms of trying to measure the damage. And it really came to light through Job Keeper and some of the government initiatives, certainly in Australia. And also talking to friends in in the UK, in as much as a lot of the arts industry work job to job, they might have three, four five, six different contracts a year, they’ll be set up in a different employment structure, they might be an ABN, they might work part time under a PYG for multiple employees. And they were frozen out of the Job Keeper subsidy system. So, their employers weren’t able to offer it to them because they haven’t been there for a year or they were a husband-and-wife partnership who had a structure as a partnership, and only one of those people was able to apply for those wages. So, they took a massive hit, and continue to take a massive hit until they come back. And I think you’re right, Kerry, a lot of that damage will be hidden, and it won’t surface until we start to find the people we relied on that maybe we didn’t even know we relied on just don’t exist in that chain anymore. Because they’ve had to move on. They’ve had to become an Uber driver, they’ve had to go and start a shop doing something completely different. They’ve had to turn their scenery factory into a factory that makes desks rather than scenery for a show, and they might find that’s more profitable for them in the long run. And so, they move out of an industry that they were an expert in.

O’Brien: So, do you believe that as an almost certain likelihood that some very talented people, who in many cases may have worked and struggled for a very long time to pursue their art, will be lost to the industry forever?

Auckland: I think undoubtedly there’ll be people who have found it too hard to continue in this industry and who made a decision to do something completely different, and their talents and their skills will be lost. And I’ve had discussions with people over the lead up to this. And we talked and we talked about an artist who makes a living from art, but makes a living earning maybe $25,000 or $30,000 a year. But they had an opportunity to make that living. At the moment, because the shows where they might normally display their art of being closed, the markets where they might normally have gone to aren’t there anymore, and so they’ve gone from almost subsistence to nothing. And they’ve had to find a different way of subsidizing their life. So, they’re gone, and institutions around the world will be gone. I read, again, I was doing some reading today and an estimate of about 85,000 museums and cultural institutions around the world closed, and about 10% of those won’t reopen. So those 8500, if each of them just employs 20 people, there’s 17,000 people around the world, 17,000 people who worked in a museum, that museum may have been an integral part of a city or a village or a suburb, attracts tourists gives the city something to deal with and to hang on to and to be proud of, it’s gone because they couldn’t open their doors, they can’t have people in, and they can’t sustain themselves. They have no government subsidy, they have nothing. Philanthropic subsidies have continued, but they’ll drop off because everybody is suffering in some way, shape, or form. There’s some very, very big end of town who you see the headlines, have made a lot of money out of the pandemic for very different reasons. But overall, I would say we’ll see a decrease in philanthropy, we’ll see a decrease in sponsorship because there’s less product to sponsor. People are wary about: will that product actually make it to the stage or film or screen or public event?

O’Brien: There was a very real sense that governments were tone deaf to the problems of artists and in the arts in Australia. And when the government did come good with some money, I still hear stories of how that money still has not filtered through to people. What do you think that says?

Auckland: I think that along with the premium that’s been placed on arts degrees says a lot about how the current federal government views the arts industry in arts and culture in general. I think it’s a government-by-government case, I think some state governments have stepped up in major ways to support their artists and their art industries, I think the Federal government will make a lot of noise about over $700 million dollars in art support. But if you start picking that apart, the amount of that makes its way to the grassroots or to people who are trying to create practices, is very small. Most of that money, $400 million – so over half of it – is dedicated straight towards trying to attract large scale foreign films to Australia, which is a great endeavor, I won’t diminish that industry. But if you go, right, we’ve given you $700 million, but $400 million if it just going to that lot. By the way, here’s another $50 million, that’s going to that lot as well. And $90 million of it is for guaranteed loans. And there’s no producers that I know of who are willing to take a loan at the moment. So $90 million of it is just sitting. Yeah, fluff.

O’Brien: So, it’s easy to blame government and governments are a reflection of us in the end, aren’t they? I wonder, do Australians really value the depths of an arts industry anyway, apart from the popular stream of say, cinema, the Netflix phenomenon, the mainstream music industry and reality television?

Auckland: I think if you ask anyone in Melbourne, if they’ve missed the opportunity to go out and hear a live band or go to the cinema, or go and see a show or go to a museum, then you get a very rapid response. Uh, yeah, we value the arts and we didn’t really know how much until it was taken away from us.

O’Brien: But, we let governments get away with it. No, I mean, historically, we do. I did some did a little trawl through my own memory and, looking at what history would suggest about the seeds of Australian creative, artistic life. I think most of those seeds in modern Australia were planted when the arts have had a champion at court. The film industry came alive when it was championed by John Gordon, the arts generally, again, under Whitlam and then under Keating, that’s three prime ministers showing a serious interest in the arts over about eight years in the last 50. What does that say about how much this nation not just its politicians, but this nation genuinely values its art and culture apart from getting a little swell of pride when we see Kate Blanchett an Oscar or something?

Auckland: I think, Kerry, without sticking the knife into the industry that I’m very proud of, I think it says as much about the industry and our inability to tell our story and the story of how valuable we are to the soul of the nation, the salve that we can be to a nation in times of great trouble. If you look at the way that the arts industry responded during the bushfires, for instance, who were the first people out there with concerts on with charity relief efforts. I think it says a lot about our inability to tell our own story in a meaningful way, without telling our story as a, I’m a poor struggling artist, you need to support me, you need to give me state support to survive. So, I think it says a lot about our inability to tell that story. I think COVID has been a real push along for the art industry. We’ve started to understand what we mean in terms of financial gain to Australia as a whole, $112 billion annually. $112 billion annually, in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, one in every 50 people, one in every 50 people works in the creative industries. So, we’re a big part of the population. But we haven’t told that story effectively. And we need to find ways to do that. And you think we’ll be able to because we’re really good at storytelling getting like we can’t tell our own?

O’Brien: It’s getting late, Mick.

Auckland: Well, it’s not because we’re coming out, we’re coming out of a horrible situation. And that is the time to push them.

O’Brien: You’ve had a long time to tell the story, the sort of, modern renaissance of the arts does go back to Gordon’s time.

Auckland: Now’s the time to push that reset button.

O’Brien: I’d agree with you. Rebecca, and before I go to Rebecca, who is also closely involved with the arts, just briefly how quickly you expect to see your recovery.

Auckland: I think it’ll be on a number of levels, Kerry, I think we’re seeing green shoots already. We’ve got projects down in New South Wales announcing they’re coming back for like big musical projects coming back. We’ve got concerts being booked in the concert promoters, asking about HOTA. I think that the touring art circuit will take a while to come back. So, those smaller productions that rely on having a series of events across a 6, 12, 18-month period, all lined up before they can go, they will take longer because they rely on festivals that aren’t yet of any certainty, and on organisations like HOTA, who can’t yet commit to some of the full house requirements that they might need, although we’re very close to doing that.

O’Brien: So, Rebecca, you are closely involved with the arts, you’re on the board of Bell Shakespeare, you’ve advised the Australia Council, with all the pent-up restlessness from all the restrictions over the last 10 months that we’ve had imposed on us, do you think the arts are going to come roaring back?

Huntley: Look, I think some of them, organizations that are already well placed both to take advantage of you know, the ability to deliver arts continually in both a live and digital stream and kind of combine them will be able to do that. Organizations that are good at getting the philanthropic dollar, which is gonna start to dry up. I mean, I’ve got to say I don’t think philanthropists in Australia have been particularly good at supporting the arts in this country compared to other countries. So, I think it will be an uneven and shaky return. There’s absolutely no doubt that people, there’s only so much Netflix and chilling you can do. And by actual Netflix and chill. I mean, actual Netflix, there’s only actually, there’s only so much Netflix that can sustain you. There is nothing like being in a live environment and seeing something and feeling the interaction around you. And people will miss that. I think the larger question is, have we lost through COVID the storytellers that are going to actually accurately explain what we’ve been through, you know, there should be a raft of interesting stories that is music, and plays, and writing about reflections on COVID that will support people as they try and work out what we’ve been through and what we’re going to go through. But have we lost some of those storytellers? Because in so many ways, those people are also people who are artists, are also reliant upon jobs in in sectors like education, which has been ravaged, hospitality and elsewhere. I mean, not all artists can marry, marry corporate lawyers, and not all artists want to. So we’re in a really difficult situation. And you’re right to identify that the arts do well, when you have leaders that would pay for theater ticket themselves.

O’Brien: I didn’t say they paid for their own tickets.

Huntley: And who knows, you know, whether they disclosed where they get those things, those freebies? I think, you know, having done a lot of research on community attitudes towards the art, I would say that people value the arts in theory, but what they don’t see are champions in across political, across public life in Australia who work diligently talk about the value that the art brings. Not just the economic value, the arts employ people, you know, the arts industry is an employer. It’s a contributor at every level. And so we need those constant voices that champion that in the way that we have those in sport across the nation. It’s almost inconceivable to have a political leader who doesn’t own at least one football staff in this country and we just don’t have the power in the arts.

Auckland: Yeah, maybe we need scarves.

Huntley: No, we don’t need scarves.

O’Brien: Only if you’ve got a draft theatre. Now, universities feed Australia’s creative industries and creativity and imagination and learning. At the center of our universe, really, whether it’s arts or engineering, yet, universities have been knocked rotten by this pandemic. Rebecca, how do they recover?

Huntley: I don’t know. You know, a political leader can look at the arts industry and think these, you know, these lefties don’t vote for me, I’ll ignore them, you know, they can diminish the economic value of the arts, they can do that very easily. Any clear-eyed economist would look at what the tertiary education sector provides to the Australian economy, its opportunity to provide that in the future. The solutions, for COVID, and any pandemic are not going to come from Google, and they’re not going to come from Gina Rinehart, they’re gonna come from universities. Ability to adapt and mitigate climate change is going to come from universities. And what is so extraordinary to me, and I can only see it as ideological, that the Federal government would actively exclude the university sector from Job Keeper, and from any kind of support, and it is a decimated sector across the board. We’re seeing talented young academics walking away, we are seeing mid-career academics taking voluntary redundancies, ending their careers in their early 50s. We’re seeing it across every single profession. And this is not a sector that was particularly well supported to begin with. But it’s a sector that is a huge employer. It’s a huge generator of valuable kinds of intellectual ideas of educating the next generation. I just cannot understand it, it makes no sense. And it doesn’t stem from the community. It really doesn’t. And again, it’s not necessarily something that people vote for. But I just, you know, that continuously 15 years of listening to Australians, what are the institutions that they trust, the institutions they turn to, the institutions they want their children to aspire to go to, and those are universities. And actually one of the most heartwarming political statements around universities was Jacqui Lambie’s speech saying that she didn’t want, you know, she did not support what the government is doing around higher education because she wanted every kid, no matter if they’re a poor kid from regional Tasmania, to aspires to go to university, and that is the general community view about universities and the value of the tertiary education sector. The view of economists, but not of our Federal leaders and I think it’s appalling.

O’Brien: So, Nigel, suddenly the scientists working on vaccines are heroes. So, have Australian science and medical research institutions, most of them attached to universities, been quarantined, from the hit that university generally have taken?

McMillan: Sadly, not at all. And I agree with the previous comments, you know, this government almost seems to have an ideological bent against higher education. You know, when people were put in the first pandemic lockdown, what do they all turn to? They all turned to the arts for entertainment. Absolutely. And the government turned to universities for solutions. And yet, some of the legislation that has recently gone through is essentially ripped almost $5 billion out of research support. And the government has said we’ve sorted their problem out because we’re putting a billion dollars back next year. Well, you don’t need to have an advanced mathematics degree to see that doesn’t quite add up, does it? Over time. It’s clear that every time we do an economic study into the value investment in, in medical research, let alone in the other research is that this pays us back in spades. So, the latest from the AAMRI, the Medical Research Institute of Australia, shows that we get $5 back for every dollar we invest in research. And you know, there’s the old story that, you know, the polio vaccine itself saved so much money, it could pay for all medical research that will ever be done. But of course, that’s not how politicians think. So, you know, I feel a little disheartened that this particular Federal government seems to almost, not have turned their backs but that there’s no windfall on this. And yet they turned to us for solutions and you know, UQ’s vaccine is going to be in a very important part of our recovery. And certainly they’re throwing some money into that, but as a sector, you know, we feel ignored, in some ways.

O’Brien: It’s sad but true that the older you get, the more memories you collect have of long, endless recurring debates about various things, particularly for covering politics. And one of them is about the importance of research and development in Australia. And, it’s one of those things where if you had a chart with a graph, it would be like that endlessly. I mean, we never seem to be able to learn about how to maintain some important critical elements of our society and our economy. And that would be one of them, surely. And we show ourselves, time and again, to be in the front of the world, when we’re given the opportunity to expand our own minds and make our own discoveries. How do you get the message through?

McMillan: And when you’re talking about the arts not telling their story, I’m reminded that I think that we as researchers to have a job to do and telling our story. So, I run a class for advanced research students, and I asked him at the very beginning of this class, can you name significant Australian medical research discoveries? And they struggle, and they’re science kids, and if we can’t find out from them, so you know, things like Gardasil, the hematocrit, you know, the first chemotherapy trial, cochlear ear implants, we bet so far above average. And as I say, this is all investment that’s, that pays itself back in spades. So, we, as a group, I guess, have to keep pounding at the door to say, this is fantastic. We have some of the world’s leading scientists in lots of great areas. And just think of Queensland, you know, in terms of vaccines, so Gardasil came out of Fraser’s lab, we have the UQ vaccine, we have a fantastic new company called Vaxis, who have this painless, nano-patch needle, that is going to be a huge thing in the future. We have an incredibly proud history, just within our own state, and let alone all the fantastic things that happen around the country. So, it’s just a matter of keep knocking on the government door and reminding them that this is not, this is not money poured down the drain, this is an investment that pays itself back.

O’Brien: It sounds like working at the ABC and knocking on the government’s door. I mean, they must have, they must be very heavily lined on the inside. Because it just seems to me it’s almost criminal. And I’m not just talking about one government. Can you remember a time in your professional career when there has been a sense of uniformity in government’s approach to this issue of scientific and medical research?

McMillan: Not at all. And I think, you know, perhaps this comes out of the way that we think about how government invests its money. So, you know, in terms of the way Treasury, who all departments bow down to get money out in their budgets, essentially, as to where we divvy this money up, and how we see it, we can blow up, you know, a few billion dollars on water in the Murray Darling Basin, but essentially not oversee how any of that actually occurs. And we have countless examples of wastage in government essentially. And yet, you know, you look at things like the arts, like the ABC, like medical research, which have clearly proven their case many times over. You know, perhaps it’s a lack of imagination, perhaps it’s the immediacy of elections that really, I want something to show you next election cycle to say, you know, I’ve got this vaccine out, a certain world leader perhaps would have liked announcements to be made a week or two earlier, you know.

O’Brien: Well, he was making them anyway.

McMillan: True enough.

O’Brien: I want to bring you back to what we started talking about, which is why we’re here: that’s the pandemic. You’re very much a part of society, as well as being the scientist, you’re not remote from society. What are the big picture patterns that have emerged for you about how we’ve handled the pandemic so far, and what it’s told you about our society.

McMillan: So, there’s been some incredible lessons out of this pandemic. So, there are a number of things that were previously not thought possible, that are now completely possible. So, think about changed work patterns. So, you know, I’ve said before that I think the NBN has actually been the best government investment in this pandemic, in the long run that we ever made. Because people can be productive at home, this idea that you could work from home, employers didn’t like it.

O’Brien: Some people will say despite NBN, but go on.

McMillan: It depends. Your mileage may vary. But generally, I think without the NBN with our old system, we would have been pretty snookered here on that sort of productivity, I think working at home. So, our work patterns are going to change completely from this pandemic, I think that you’ll find big companies will now perhaps deescalate their inner-city presence, they might regionalize out. A lot of companies have taken opportunities to restructure themselves, you know, never waste a good crisis, sort of thing. So, I think that’s been one lesson. Another lesson is, look what happened to the flu. We have had less than 5% of our annual flu cases. And that’s just because people wash their bloody hands. And you know, sanitizer was out there. And people covered their coffee. Like it’s really simple stuff that we banged on about and isolated themselves, banged on about for years and not made much of a difference. But hey, the pandemic comes along, suddenly, we’ve had hardly any flu deaths this year. People often ask me, well, what will people keep that up? I’m cynical that in five years’ time, we’ll be back to where we were. But we’ll see how that works out. And then other fractures, I think that I’ve noticed. So, we’ve seen young versus old, perhaps in a more worldwide sense. So older people clearly suffer the mortality of this disease, and young people don’t. And so, you know, you see partying in Miami Beach, etc, I’ll be fine. But you know, we’re not thinking about grandma and granddad, and nearly everyone has one. So, generally, so young versus old, and the debate about health versus economy. So, there’s this endless debate where we, if we lock down our economies stuffed, we’ve got to keep that economic activity and you see approaches from Sweden about how they went about that, which really hasn’t worked out really that well for them. So, do you take the short-term economic hit? So, I think that rich versus poor and racial disparities, so at the end of the first wave in New York, 3%, of, of white patients had antibodies to COVID and 21% of black patients and black people overrepresented in terms of deaths and hospitalizations in that city. So, there’s been lots of lessons, I think books and books will be written about this as time goes on.

Huntley: You know, I agree with all of that. And I think there was no doubt that the crisis would expose the big gaps and weaknesses and strengths and of our community. The question is now, is how do we respond when we vote? And how do leaders respond to that? Is it that we simply say, oh, well, you know, once it’s all going, when it all goes back to normal, we’ll still put up with those kinds of questions? You know, if we think that if we think that the pandemic exposes the inequalities in our society, wait for climate change. And the issues that happen there in terms of the people least responsible for climate change being at the forefront of its effects. So, I think it you know, there could be books written about the about what it’s shown about our society. The question now is what will leaders do? And our leaders particularly, I think, almost interestingly, because what the pandemic did is, I think, in the minds of Australians is kind of what the, the GFC did in the minds of Australians, which is we’re affected by the world, but we’re kind of lucky. It’s never quite as bad for us. So, it boosts a bit of hubris that we have that will kind of skate through okay. And we don’t know, we don’t know why that happens. Maybe it’s because we’re in the corner of the world. Maybe it’s because we’ve got reasonable leaders, maybe it’s because a certain amount of affluence, but there’ll be a moment where our luck runs out. And that’s got a lot to do with climate change, and I wonder what our leadership will be like, when that comes, just pointing out but the, you know, inequalities in our society will be insufficient, at that stage. We really have to do a lot to ensure that as we move into the climate age, we don’t look wistfully back at the pandemic, as you know, a nice time where we got to stay at home, bake banana bread and work from home in elasticated pants.

O’Brien: In elasticated pants?

Huntley: Oh, yeah, definitely. I’m wearing them right now.

O’Brien: I’m glad it works for some. And Nigel, it must have just struck you: the contrast between the way politicians, broadly speaking, have failed to embrace the science of climate change, and yet see many of those same politicians almost eagerly embracing and surrounding themselves with health officials to give them the kind of official stamp of approval on their policies to do with the pandemic.

McMillan: It’s, it’s stunning, in a sense, isn’t it? And you know, so what is this pandemic going to do to our climate change debate? You know, I think in certain countries, it’s not going to change anything at all. You can see this huge distrust of authority in the US, for example, where they won’t even you know, wearing masks became a political statement rather than an actual public health measure to save people. The fact that health officials are seen in a better light than climate scientists, and is that because of the way climate scientists have prosecuted their case? And we inherently trust health officials, because we all go to the doctor and have to do unspeakable things, sometimes? I’m really not sure. But I think in the long run, I’d like to think that politicians would, you know, my rose-colored world, I guess, would perhaps start paying a lot more attention, because the evidence around climate change is, is pretty incontrovertible. And it is going to happen. And the sooner we do something about it, the better. I mean, and yet we see states now deciding they’re gonna put taxes on electric cars, for example. I mean, the only country in the world that’s going to actually tax green technology in a sense.

O’Brien: We used to be seen as a country that embraced new technology. Well, I suspect if the circumstances were properly set, we would again with electric cars. But anyway, let’s not get too distracted. And before we come to a question to end on with all three of you, Nigel, one last one for you. That somewhere in all of this is the specter of other pandemics, because we’re told there will be others as a certainty, for which we might not so easily find a vaccine. How real is that concern? And how can we prepare better for that than we did this one, because there was a national committee set up in about 2000, the early 2000s, to prepare for this event. And it just got eroded and eroded and eroded because the pandemic didn’t come soon enough.

McMillan: So, every country in the world, thinking about that sort of worst-case scenarios, nuclear war, invasion and pandemics, it’s in the top three. And you point out rightly, that Australia, as essentially had forgotten a lot of its history, because it didn’t come along. We didn’t, you know, in America, they completely disbanded in the office. There’s no sure thing we are going to get pandemics in the future. Is it going to be 100 years? Is it going to be next year, it’s like the San Andreas fault, it’s going to happen, we just don’t know when. And I mean, we have had a major pandemic in 1968. We’ve had minor epidemics in as soon as 2010 with H1N1. So, it’s this is a constant war. The irony about almost the abuse of the Wu Han Virology Institute was that they were doing exactly what we need to do. We need sentinel places who are going to be surveying what’s going on with wildlife. And the more and more we encroach on wildlife territory, the more interaction we have, the more likely this is to occur. And you know, in Australia, we have a huge bat population. And we have people out there surveying what’s going on with the viruses all the time. So, it’s that really important work to see what is coming down the road that we need to be aware of, that’s going to be our first port of call having a pandemic plan. I think every government will have that now, for sure.

O’Brien: Will they still have it in eight years’ time?

McMillan: Well, maybe not in 80 years’ time or see if nothing happens. But in terms of technologies and vaccines, this has been a game changer, this particular pandemic to go from, from nothing to ready to go in humans in 10 months is, it’s unheard-of speed. I was involved in the development of Gardasil that took 15 years.

O’Brien: Well, you know that’s just there’s another side to that coin, Nigel, and that is that we think, oh, well, we did it in 10 months this time. We’ll just do the same next time.

McMillan: I think we have the technological capability to make vaccines to pretty much anything now. So, I’m not particularly concerned that we won’t to be able to make a vaccine. But we look at diseases, we are constantly attacked, HIV, you know, flu virus, this particular virus. I shamefully said very early on this, this is not a very good virus, and we were talking about whether it was man made or not. And I said if I was going to design a virus to cause mayhem, it wouldn’t be this one. And I shamefully recant that because it’s damn good virus and it’s caused a lot of mayhem.

O’Brien: Now I’m going to jump ahead two years for last round of questions. The vaccines have been successful. Global travel is just about back to normal. We’re clawing our way out of recession. Are we really going to be living life any differently than we were a year ago because we’re constantly being told it’s going to be a new world from here on in? Why won’t we just return to what normal used to be? Mick Auckland.

Auckland: Experienced at HOTA has told me that people want to feel safe during the pandemic. I think that we’ll hang on for quite a while. I think that there’ll be a mammalian memory, the effect of, you know, I’m not comfortable in a big mosh pit environment, I want to have my space, I want to have my wheat crop circles out, everybody fell in love with their crop circles because they had their own piece of land. I think that will hang around for a while. And we’ll see that effect definitely through the next couple of years. And that might impact on the return of people to the arts and the return of people to sit in close in a dark, confined room for an hour or two hours at a time. Although, if you look at the football, my case gets shot in the arm because you know.

O’Brien: I could not follow that, while we’re still socially distancing there’s 50,000 of us allowed to go to a stadium.

Auckland: Well, not only go to a stadium, but stand next to each other and sing the national anthem at full voice, while a choir who’s training has to stand four meters apart.

McMillan: And 200 a funeral.

Auckland: You know, so there was some slight inconsistency in policy there, I grant you.

O‘Brien: Rebecca?

Huntley: Look, I think one of the things I worry about in two years’ time, is even if we do return to normal, and then go back to my hobby horse of what’s happened to higher education, is that we’re going to have people having left higher education, having had people perhaps not the best experiences, students in higher education. All of the other challenges that faces us social, economic and otherwise, we need the best smartest, cleverest people turning our minds to those questions. Will we be able to deal with them adequately if we don’t have the personnel to deal with it? And if and on the arts question if we don’t have the diverse voices to interpret our present and our future. So, I worry that even though it’s been only two years, the damage done to some of those sectors will have a very long tail.

O’Brien: Are our work pattern’s going to continue to be much more flexible?

Huntley: I think yes. And I think there’s good and bad things about that. I think that there’s going to be, you know, the perhaps decentralization of cities, less commuting. But I also think there are questions around social isolation as well, that are going to increase, and the ability to work from home and elasticated pants as I said is not a privilege that is afforded to a whole lot of people. So, I’m aware that when I talk about the upside of flexible work, that doesn’t have a lot of resonance for the people that are still cleaning hospitals and still cleaning aged care facilities.

O’Brien: Is aged care going to be better? What have we learned? What have we learned as far as aged care is concerned and a pandemic, are they going to get instant access to hospitals like anybody else if they get sick?

Huntley: What I’ve realized, having done a lot of work in aged care, and spent a lot of time in aged care facilities, is I don’t know if we have an effective economic model to care for our aging population, if we also don’t have a community model for care. You can have the best possible care for somebody in an aged care facility, but if you don’t have people that they know and love to come and visit them and interact with them, you’re never going to have quality of care. It’s not just the staff. It’s not just the staff to, you know, resident ratio, it’s the people that have the time and have the relationships to come and visit people when they’re older. So, we need a whole of community response to care, we can have a government response we can have, we can throw a whole lot of money at it. But unless we spend time with people, older people, we’re not going to be able to care for them.

O’Brien: Nigel McMillan, are we going to be living life any differently as far as you’re concerned?

McMillan: I think we will. And I guess this question of working at home and work disturbing into our home life, we need to definitely find a balance there. I think that in terms of international travel, I think that the leisure traveler will jump at it, I think they’ll really be into it. But I suspect the business traveler will be more reluctant to travel. The idea that we can do business quite efficiently, the video conferencing has come of age. I think that will mean, I think a lot less international conferences for Nigel Macmillan. And, and then perhaps the best thing in a few years’ time is you won’t need to be hearing from me because there won’t be any pandemic to worry about.

O’Brien: I do hope you’re right. a terrific discussion. I thank Rebecca Huntley, Nigel McMillan, Mick Auckland. Thank you all very much for engaging in this conversation tonight. Thank you.

Criena Gehrke, CEO at HOTA: Hi, I’m Criena Gehrke. I’m the CEO here at HOTA, Home of the Arts. And I get to say the “thank yous” tonight, which is always a great privilege. Kerry, thank you for guiding us through a global pandemic, both literally and metaphorically over the last conversations that we’ve had the great privilege to host here at HOTA. As for the panel, Nigel, Rebecca has disappeared, have you? Somewhere out there in cyberspace, and the absolutely delightful Mick Auckland who I have a vested interest in. I just want to recap things that I have learnt tonight and it’s a pity that Rebecca has gone because elasticated pants are good. Right? So that’s my top takeaway, and I’m going to actually bring them to work as well as at home. You too?

McMillan: We didn’t discuss work dress patterns that may change, for the worse.

Gehrke: I feel like making you three stand up and go-

McMillan: And although let’s face it with science, the standards are pretty low, let’s face it.

Gehrke: Well, that leads me to the first thing that I’m going to take away from tonight, which is trust the science people. Absolutely trust the science, even if it isn’t 100% perfect. And I always disclose that I have the great privilege of working with a chair who is a scientist and through this whole pandemic has reminded me of the science time and time again. The other one was seek the truth. The third one was tell the stories and tell better stories and tell them loudly and clearly and scream them from the rafters. Be curious about our humanity. And I do wonder whether, when we combine all of those things, that what we’re actually seeking is the new Renaissance, where politics, academic pursuit, the arts, philosophy and the very humans that we are, all come together to make the world a better place. So, thank you for a wonderful conversation this evening. To Carolyn Evans and the team, we have been delighted with this partnership, to be able to have these exquisite conversations during what has been an extraordinary time and we needed them and required them more than ever. So, thank you to you and your amazing team. To the HOTA team, you are incredible. I’m very grateful to work with all of you and I’m very pleased to say that we will be continuing these conversations next year, and we can’t wait to welcome you back to HOTA. Wash your hands. Good evening.

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