Thursday, 28 March, 2024
HomeTalking PointsFormer Australian PM: Allow elderly COVID-19 patients to die

Former Australian PM: Allow elderly COVID-19 patients to die

Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister called for an end to "virus hysteria" in a speech to a UK policy think-tank, saying that some elderly COVID-19 patients should be allowed to die to reduce the economic costs of lockdown. The Daily Telegraph reports that Abbott accused Western politicians of choosing to spend ruinous amounts of money on healthcare rather than encouraging the public to face up to the risks of the virus. He warned that thanks to "virus hysteria", draconian lockdown measures could persist almost indefinitely, adding to economic slowdown and creating a “something for nothing mindset” among young people living on furlough.

The Daily Telegraph reports that his comments, made during a visit to London, come just a week after it was reported that Abbott – staunch supporter of Brexit – was to be made Britain's new joint president of the Board of Trade. The job will involve drumming up deals for the UK around the world in the post-Brexit era.

Abbott addressed the COVID issue during a speech to the Policy Exchange think-tank, in which he said that it would be better to allow elderly COVID patients to die naturally rather than keeping them alive through expensive medical care. He said Australian health officials were spending up to £100,000 keeping elderly COVID patients alive, significantly more than they would normally allot for life-saving geriatric care.

Politicians, he argued, had a duty to act more "like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about the level of deaths we might have to live with”.

The Telegraph reports that addressing the wider social impact of lockdown, he added: "From a health perspective, this pandemic has been serious. From an economic perspective, it has been disastrous. But I suspect that, from an overall well-being perspective, it will turn out worst of all. Because this is what happens when, for much more than a mere moment, we let fear of falling sick stop us from being fully alive.

"Now that each one of us has had six months to consider this pandemic and to make our own judgments about it, surely it is time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks that they are prepared to run?"

Abbott, a staunch Catholic who headed his country's centre-right Liberal Party, was prime minister of Australia between 2013 and 2015. He is known for his plain speaking, although his view that too much money is being spent on looking after the elderly will likely cause controversy.

The report says the head of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the desire of governments to "get their economies going again" could be a "recipe for disaster" if it led to lockdown measures being lifted too hastily. He said the only way to ease lockdown safely was to introduce extra measures to protect the elderly, those with underlying conditions and essential workers.

Abbott, though, warned of pandering too much to "health dictatorships". He said that some people in public life had a vested interest in prolonging lockdown, "especially if the crisis adds to their authority or boosts their standing".

He also raised the spectre of promoting a dependency culture through furlough payments. People who were "once sturdily self-reliant”, he said, were now “looking to the government more than ever for support and sustenance, a something-for-nothing mindset, reinforced among young people spared the need of searching for jobs".

He added: “The generation of the Second World War had been prepared to risk life to preserve freedom. This generation is ready to risk freedom to preserve life.”

 

[link url="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/01/tony-abbott-rails-against-covid-health-dictatorships-saying/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr"]Full report in The Daily Telegraph[/link]

 

[link url="https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Australia-and-the-Coronavirus-Crisis.pdf"]Keynote speech[/link]

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