I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW
THE VOICE OF CALM
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has learned he can handle extreme stress and 100-hour workweeks – so long as he maintains a vigorous exercise regime
“I was at my son’s cricket on the 1st of February last year when Brendan Murphy, then Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, sent me a message saying there was now sustained human-to-human transmission in China beyond Wuhan.
I jog or walk laps while I’m at the cricket. On this morning I just kept walking while making calls to various people including the PM. At the end of it, one of the dads said, ‘Oh, you had a fairly serious look on your face’. I said, ‘Yeah, it wasn’t just my ordinary walk’. We closed the borders to China that night and from then on nothing was the same.
Luckily, I came into this crisis at pretty much peak fitness for me. I’ve been obsessive about my running for a long time. Over the course of a year, I average about 20,000 steps a day. When I’m in Canberra, I’ll start early by walking 4km to work. I’ll work for an hour and then run up Red Hill, which is another 6km all up. So, I’ll have a lot under my belt – with more walking to come – before the first leadership meeting at 8:30. In late January last year, I did a 5km park run in 23:30 – pretty good going for a bloke in his mid-50s.
The workload has been considerable. When we were
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