Credit:Alex EllinghausenĪs Australia and the EU worked on convincing countries to sign up to the motion, the United States was being unhelpful. Throughout the two weeks of talks, they say there were multiple serious attempts to weaken the motion.Įuropean Union Ambassador to Australia, Dr Michael Pulch, at Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday. This included attempts to make the review look at the "achievements" of certain countries, according to senior sources from multiple countries familiar with the negotiations. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age can reveal that while Australia was strengthening the language, some countries, including China and Russia, were trying to water it down. They settled on stipulating that the inquiry would begin at "the earliest appropriate moment", rather than immediately.īut the EU and Australia faced many obstacles. Australian negotiators quickly moved to reassure these countries they were happy to remain patient. One concern the EU and other countries, including some from Africa, raised with Australia early on was how fast Canberra appeared to want to move. Australia's representative on the WHO's executive board, Dr Lisa Studdert, was also lobbying her counterparts for the review. Meanwhile, Payne spoke on the phone to about 40 of her counterparts around the world canvassing Australia's push for a review, while Morrison raised the issue in a number of his conversations and wrote to all G20 leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. Now, they could either continue to press ahead with their own version of an inquiry, or join forces with the EU. Morrison and Payne insisted on the review being separate from the World Health Organisation, after it had been criticised for acting too slowly in the early stages of the outbreak and being too close to the Chinese government. Without warning other countries, Payne went on the ABC's Insiders program on April 18 calling for an independent investigation into the origins and early handling of the coronavirus outbreak, a stance that infuriated China. It was nowhere near what the Australian Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister had been proposing for the past few weeks. On April 28, the European Union announced it was pressing ahead with a motion at the World Health Assembly calling for an evaluation of the global pandemic, which was ravaging countries all over the world. Scott Morrison and Marise Payne were almost two weeks into their campaign for an independent global review into the coronavirus when they suddenly had a key decision to make.
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