Among the many messages Greg Hunt has received during the pandemic was this from an old friend: 'Fact-based, methodical, some would even say a little boring – I knew your style would come into vogue one day'.
The China flight ban was a risky decision, coming as it did weeks before the World Health Organisation would formally label the outbreak a pandemic. Canberra was slower to close off against other countries. But microbiologist Professor Brendan Crabb, head of Melbourne's prestigious Burnet Institute, says that early move was critically important, and testament to the trust that existed between Murphy and Hunt, and between Hunt and Morrison.
Hunt senior had four sons by his first marriage but the older boys lived interstate, leaving young Greg effectively an only child. He once described accompanying his father around the regions on ministerial business during school holidays, acquiring an unlikely expertise in "urban planning and the size of towns" by the time he was eight.
He insists his childhood was in fact "very happy" despite its ups and downs. Yet the armchair psychologist has to wonder whether his seeming fixation with order and control is not partly rooted in having to deal with his mother's unpredictability from such a young age. On his return to Australia, Hunt had a place guaranteed at Melbourne University to study arts and law. Living at Ormond College, he became head of the university's debating society and together with Rufus Black was runner-up at the world debating championships in Edinburgh. But he stayed aloof from student politics, where most would-be politicians cut their teeth.
Hunt went into Parliament labelled a party "moderate" and remains so on social issues such as same-sex marriage, which he supported. But his true ideological affinity lies closer to libertarianism, or what he calls "realist liberalism", which puts individual choice at a premium and is hostile to what, in his first parliamentary speech, he referred to as "enforced equality".
As undergraduates he and Black had co-authored a thesis for their course in natural resources law, which they titled. The paper, which made a strong case for taxing companies on the industrial waste they produced, rested on similar economic principles to those that underpinned the Gillard government's carbon tax years later.
But John Connor, chief executive officer of the Carbon Market Institute, says while Hunt "may have been playing the long game and did some positive things", he nonetheless "wears the stain" of dismantling a mechanism which was the most effective brake on the country's greenhouse gas emissions. Each speech is divided with military precision into subheadings, points and sub-points, which is also how he likes his departmental briefs: on a single page with what he calls a "three-by-three structure" – three themes, three points in each. It became an inside joke among some colleagues.
He began a marathon overhaul of state hospital funding agreements, introduced "gold, silver and bronze" rankings in private health insurance to make it easier for consumers to compare policies, soothed the pharmacy sector and placated GPs by gradually lifting the freeze which the Abbott government had placed on Medicare rebates. "His approach was to make himself incredibly accessible," recalls one industry source. "Everyone got his phone number.
Hunt had proven adept at leveraging the popular Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, or PBS, for maximum political advantage. Whereas predecessors in the portfolio had released new listings of subsidised medicines by way of administrative fiat with little hoopla, Hunt elevated each with an individual press release and a patient-centred narrative to back it up.
Behind the scenes, Hunt has been willing to apply the screws to companies which won't come to the table on pricing. At the height of one dispute with Boston-based giant Vertex, when negotiations stalled over listing of a cystic fibrosis medicine, Hunt's tactics are understood to have included ringing senior US executives at 2am – their time – to keep the pressure up.
In December 2018, doctors had told Argiro and his wife Gina De Angelis that nothing more could be done here to stop the progression of Gina's aggressive lymphoma. Her only option was to travel to the US for a revolutionary treatment known as CAR-T therapy, at a cost of close to a million dollars. While federal funding can be made available for rare cases like this under the Medical Treatment Overseas Program, the approval process at that stage was six to eight weeks.
He commends her courage in a speech announcing $35 million in fresh funds for clinical trials targeted at rare cancers such as hers., Hunt abandons his usual earnestness to crack a joke about social distancing as each guest moves obediently to a marked spot on the floor. "I feel like I'm about to lead a Pilates class – or perhaps a rendition of Nutbush City Limits," he quips.
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