Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives) Share this | Hansard source

As the Leader of the Opposition said, the Prime Minister had two principal jobs this year: a speedy, effective rollout of the vaccine and a safe national quarantine system to protect the Australian community in the meantime, and he has failed on both counts. These are the Prime Minister's failures.

I want to say this about the Minister for Health: I would rather that the member for McMahon was the minister for health during this period, but there is no-one on the government front bench that I would prefer to be the Minister for Health than the member for Flinders. He has worked hard. He is an intelligent man. He has the national interest at heart. He has been generous about briefings to both the member for McMahon and myself. We disagree on a number of occasions, but the failures that I point out today in the MPI are the failures of the Prime Minister, because, in a national emergency, the buck stops with the Prime Minister of the country. The nation is being held back by a Prime Minister who continues to duckshove his responsibility to others—to blame the media, to blame the opposition and, anything serious, to duckshove to the state governments, Labor and Liberal alike. We are being held back in the fight against this virus by a prime minister who has become dangerously complacent about the seriousness of this fight.

On vaccinations, last year the Prime Minister promised that Australians would be at the front of the queue to get a vaccine. Well, at the moment we are sitting at 113th in this nation—per doses per head of population. We are so far back, we cannot even begin to see the front of the queue. The Prime Minister promised 4 million doses by the end of March. He failed on that. He then promised there would be 6 million doses by 10 May. He has failed on that. The Prime Minister said that, over time, we would ramp up the daily and the weekly dose schedule. We have entered the fourth month of this vaccine rollout and, still, we are at about 510,000 doses per week. That is the seven-day average as of today. It was the seven-day average in the middle of last week as well. We are simply not ramping up fast enough—510,000 today, from the latest figures, and it was 511,000 on Thursday last week, when you peaked at 100,000 for the day. You went down to the 80,000s on Friday and you were at 79,000 doses on Monday. There is not an upward trajectory. And 500,000 a week, or anything close to it, is simply not quick enough to get where we need to go.

In the January strategy, also, the Prime Minister promised that those vulnerable groups, rightly identified by health experts as priority populations, would be vaccinated by Easter. But, as we heard in questions from my colleagues during question time, too many residents of aged-care facilities remain not fully vaccinated. Indeed, there remain residents of aged-care facilities across Australia, including in Victoria during this lockdown, who have not even received a single dose. We're glad that the government is moving quickly to remedy that situation—yesterday, today and tomorrow—but, still, those doses will not be effective for a number of days. They should have been done before now.

Scandalously, we heard from the disabilities royal commission last week that as many as 99 per cent of residents of those facilities have not been fully vaccinated either. This is a position that counsel assisting that royal commission described as nothing short of an 'abject failure'—an abject failure for some of the most vulnerable members of our community.

The Prime Minister said, way back in March, that this is not a race. There's no rush. Even last week, when he knew what had happened with the ATAGI advice on AstraZeneca and the supply constraints that happened earlier, he said that he was not overly troubled at the position Australia found ourselves in. This morning the aged-care minister said he was very comfortable with the position of the vaccine rollout. I think we all know, and those opposite know, that this is a race. It's a race to protect the population's health. It's a race to protect the strength of the economic recovery against these outbreaks that are happening in Victoria today. They happened two weeks or three weeks ago in Perth in the Peel region. It's a race against the variants—the mutations of this virus that are spreading all around the world. They are either more infectious or, in some cases, even resistant to natural and vaccine induced community. It is a race, and the Prime Minister's complacency around this has Australia falling too far behind.

The second job the Prime Minister had was to put in place a safe national quarantine system. This is unambiguously a Commonwealth job. I don't think any of us can remember a politician in recent memory who has made more of the role that the Commonwealth has in securing our borders than the former immigration minister who is now the Prime Minister. He was so bullish about borders for so many years of his career, but, now that the country faces a global pandemic, he washes his hands. It's a matter for the states. It's got nothing to do with him. He'll sit passively back in his chair and simply wait for people to bring proposals for a quarantine facility and decide whether or not they are worthy of his attention. The ridiculous rejection of the proposal from Toowoomba is just emblematic of this fellow's inability to grasp his responsibilities as the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth in the middle of a national emergency.

It was him, back in March 2020, who, quite rightly, imposed mandatory quarantine requirements on anyone returning to Australia—14 days of mandatory quarantine. The states stepped up to put in place hotel quarantine arrangements very, very quickly. But that is not a long-term solution. We've had 17 outbreaks of COVID from hotel quarantine in just the last six months, since the November outbreak from the Peppers Waymouth Hotel in my hometown of Adelaide, which was very clearly related to aerosol transmission in poorly ventilated hotels that, after all, were built for tourism. They were built for tourists, not for medical quarantine. Too often we have seen aerosol transmission from the room of an infected person into a corridor and then back into another room in the same corridor, which is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago in Adelaide and that has led to this lockdown in Victoria today. The Prime Minister stands up and proudly says '99.99 per cent effective'. I have to say that I don't think that is of much comfort to five million Melburnians who are locked down for seven days. I don't think it's much comfort to the million or so members of the regional Victorian community who have been disrupted as well or to the two million people in the Perth and Peel region a few weeks ago, including veterans who were not able to gather on Anzac Day because of an aerosol related outbreak from hotel quarantine.

We've said, for a couple of months at the very least, this Prime Minister has got two jobs in quarantine: first, put in place a network of dedicated facilities. Yes, there is Howard Springs. It was supposed to be expanded to 2,000 places in April-May. April-May was the time line that the Prime Minister put in place only in March. He told us today that it's all done, the rooms are there. But are the staff there? Does it actually have the expanded capacity to take the pressure off our CBD hotels as Australian citizens come home in the middle of a global pandemic? Again, he won't tell us clearly what the answer is. But he's rejected Toowoomba. I hear that they're now negotiating furiously with the Victorian government—good, at least there's something on the table. But a network should be proactively sought out by the level of government that actually has responsibility for quarantine, not just sitting back passively expecting people to bring him proposals.

The second thing we've spoken about is there should be strong national standards while we continue to rely upon hotels. There should be particularly strong standards on ventilation, on PPE, on making sure that all staff working in these hotels have been fully vaccinated. That's still not the case around the country. Yes, there's a level of state involvement in that, obviously. But the national cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, is the place to put these standards in place. So many experts have been calling for this for so long. But, again, he simply washes his hands of it and says, It's not my responsibility, it's the responsibility of state governments.' He was a little bit more even-tempered today in question time. But yesterday he was over the top. Whingeing, he called us, for deigning to question the government's performance in one of the most serious issues we have faced in our lifetime.

We were constructive last year. We supported the government's response last year, unlike the Victorian Liberals whose only position was to try to free up golfers who wanted to get out on the golf courses during the 111-day lockdown in that city. We were constructive, but we are not going to sit quietly by while this country languishes at 113th on the world table in vaccination and while we have had 17 outbreaks from hotel quarantine, many of them related to poor ventilation in buildings built for tourists and not for medical quarantine. We will be constructive, but just because the Prime Minister doesn't like it, because it makes him feel uncomfortable, because he's got a glass jaw, we're not going to sit quietly by while this performance does not improve.

See this speech in context