A major new report on the COVID pandemic has found federal, state and territory governments didn't always consider or protect people's human rights in their decision-making. The Australian Human Rights Commission says lives were saved, but it came at a cost.
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00:00What came through really clearly is that while they recognised the need for Australia to
00:07take strong measures to save lives and protect people, that did come at a really significant
00:12cost and that cost is still being felt some five years on by people who were impacted
00:18and those impacts were varied, they were deep, they were significant.
00:21To give you just one example, this report looks at border restrictions, which were a
00:25really important tool to help stop the spread of COVID, but we heard stories from people
00:31who couldn't be with loved ones in their final moments, who were stopped from returning to
00:36Australia, who were separated from family for really extended periods and what hearing
00:41those stories really reinforced in me is the need for us to not only deal with the immediate
00:47emergency when it arises, but to do so in a way that protects human rights and puts
00:52fairness and compassion at the heart of what we're trying to do.
00:56There were a whole lot of areas where that human cost was really significant and again,
01:00what comes through in the report is the really different ways that COVID affected people
01:06across the country and so the reason we think this is so important is because people are
01:10telling us they just don't feel that that's been acknowledged, they feel as though they
01:15were collateral damage, that it was overlooked and we need to learn those lessons not to
01:20cast blame on what happened because there was a lot that Australia got right, but really
01:25to look to the future and to see how can we do this better, how can we make sure that
01:29human rights are at the heart of what we're doing and that we're balancing out effective
01:34emergency responses, which ones that recognise that human cost.
01:38What did come through consistently was a need to do better in the future and so the first
01:43step for us is to look at developing an emergency response framework that learns those lessons
01:50and that again recognises that we will face emergencies in the future, but we have to do better
01:55and the urgency of that work we can see just in the last week or so in Queensland and New
02:00South Wales and I'm thinking of all of those people today dealing with the aftermath of
02:05ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred because it really does highlight the need to not only deal with
02:10the immediate emergency, but to think about how it's impacting people, what that human
02:15cost is and how we can make sure that people's rights are protected when we're dealing with
02:20a crisis situation.