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.
DeborahSnow The beatification of Greg Hunt. What more could we need on a Saturday morning.
DeborahSnow Considering the states are making most of the decisions, his role appears to be announcing non-existent vaccines. Sounds very taxing...
DeborahSnow ThisIsNotJournalism