Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've listened to 10 minutes of just falsehoods, platitudes—nothing serious. Every single day, Victorians have been living under the pressure. If you were from Victoria and for Victoria, you would know that what we've been going through is very awkward and painful and hard. Now we're going into a lockdown for two reasons: a failure of quarantine and a failure of vaccine rollout. Both of those lie fairly and squarely with the federal government—no ifs, no buts. The person from South Australia who brought COVID into Victoria arrived in Australia without having COVID and caught it in the makeshift quarantine facilities. We have been asking the government to work together—and we supported the government on everything they did last year—but the government have done the usual thing and taken away support and service, to turn it into a political football.

We've seen the arrogance of this failure of a prime minister who decided to have a national cabinet but not involve the Leader of the Opposition, because it was about politics not about people. That is the big problem that we've faced throughout. Support for the government has been strong from this side all they way through, but we keep seeing failure after failure. Questions need to be asked about when we are going to get this right. When are you actually going to do your job and look after Australians? We just heard the Minister for Health—just to show how arrogant and out of touch he is—say that proposals put forward by the Victorian government are in the outback. It's in Mickleham. It's 20 kays from the airport! It's closer than the motels are in the city. So we've got to ask: why do you want to use motels and not a purpose built quarantine facility? It's clearly because you don't want to fix this properly. You don't want to sit down and work together. You just want to sit there, make your photo opportunities, do your press releases and do nothing. You came into this place two days ago and said that in the Whittlesea area there are 15 aged-care facilities and they've all been vaccinated. That is untrue. There are two in Whittlesea, not 15, and when we spoke to them staff hadn't been done and not all the residents had been done. So I want to know why the minister comes in here during question time, when the cameras are on, and spouts these things that are just not factual. Families—

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