'I was getting about 1000 messages a day': why Greg Hunt gave up running for a while

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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.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

 

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Aged Care has been left to the horrible entrepreneurs

Thanks for this article In 2018, Greg Hunt personally handled an approach from my elderly Mother, who has suffered Migraine her whole life. He has since helped her access a treatment that has given her the longest Migraine free stint in her life. Our family is forever grateful

Greg Hunt is anything but “fact based”, just another hardline conservative masquerading as a liberal. As federal health minister doing nothing but playing partisan politics during pandemic.

🤔

These puff-pieces...nah.

Handles himself pretty good......especially when on ABC TV. pre Fed. election. He knows how to handle the Socialist labor rainbow warriors.

Shame he allowed LNP to have such poor environmental policy for so long for someone that is dedicated to the environment and science of global warming. Where is our pandemic fed training manual using adequate PPE? No guidance from Fed for pandemic states did it all themselves.

🤮

smh, Indeed. auspol TheAgeofCorruption

You guys are so pro-liberal it’s sickening.

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