Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The COVID pandemic has seen medical workers, including doctors and nurses, working 24/7. We've seen pharmacists staying open to make sure people get the medicines they need. We've seen people in pathology work shift after shift to make sure that COVID tests can be processed swiftly. We've seen politician after politician stand up and thank the heroes of the pandemic—the people on the frontline, the people that are the last defence, the medical profession, the scientists—and we rightly thank them. But we need to do more than just thank these people. We need to back them in.

Many people today will say how amazing the TGA is and how crucial it has been and continues to be to our health system in Australia. And that is absolutely right. We have an obligation to do more than just congratulate the scientists and the administrators that work at the TGA. We need to back them in. We need to support what they're doing. And we need to back in the Australian people, who have sacrificed so much in the last 12 months to get behind their state and federal governments to suppress the virus. They haven't been able to see family and friends, they have missed weddings and funerals and birthdays, they have had to talk to grandparents through windows at aged-care facilities and they haven't been able to leave their house for more than an hour in a day so that we can suppress the virus and save lives. We owe it to those people to do everything that we can to make sure that our community has confidence in the vaccine. We know that a proper rollout and penetration of the vaccine through the community is what we have to achieve to be able to carry on with suppression of this virus.

We know that the best way to protect the economy is to also deal with the virus. I know that the Prime Minister, the health minister and members of the government are outraged by what they see the member for Hughes saying on social media and in mainstream media interviews. That is why it is so disappointing to see all of these people just let him go. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. For far too long, the Prime Minister of this country has walked past the outrageous behaviour of the member for Hughes. For too long, the Prime Minister of this country has let outlier backbenchers in his government daily go about undermining the work of our public health officials, the chief health officers and chief medical officers of this country. It has to stop. Why is it that the member for Hughes felt empowered to do a podcast with Pete Evans? Why is it that he feels empowered to go on the news and say that it's his right to undermine the efficacy of the vaccine? It's because the Prime Minister walks past and turns a blind eye to what the member for Hughes does. The member is undermining public health and he is doing a disservice to every single person in this country. We cannot have a member of this parliament, elected to be a leader, spreading antivaxxer, antihealth conspiracy theories, and have the medical practitioners in the government, let alone the Prime Minister of the country, do nothing to stop it. It is a disgrace. The free speech warriors in this government, who like free speech when it's from people they think are on their side but hate it every other time, appear to think that free speech applies everywhere in this parliament. They even gag debate on whether the member for Hughes should be pulled into line by the Prime Minister and should stop his dangerous actions.

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