David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This vaccine issue is being ramped up purely for political purposes. The system is working. The last time we had a mass vaccination for the whole country was: never. It's never been like this before. It does take time to rollout a massive campaign like this. But you've just got to look at the figures. There are 3.9 million doses delivered. They make a big deal about 'not fully vaccinated'. That's because most people in nursing homes are getting the AstraZeneca vaccine, and there's a 12-week interval between them. That is why they can throw that statistic around. But, some of the statistics are: 2.5 million of these have been through Commonwealth outlets and the remainder through state systems. Both systems have had hiccups. Like I said, when you've got a system rolling out to 25 million people you expect a few logistical problems, but it is ramping up. Last week there were a couple of days when over 100,000 doses were administered in a day.

With the outbreak in Victoria, the system there will smother it. It will contact trace—they've got systems in place. Look what happened on the northern beaches. The numbers that they had in the northern beaches were controlled. I think there were 40 or 50 immediate cases that were identified, and they tracked them all down and they controlled it. It's not like we're starting from point zero. We have systems in place.

About the quarantine stations, it would be good if we did have quarantine stations. Everyone knows that. But we have empty hotels that have individual bathrooms that are isolated and that do have the logistics to keep people in quarantine as long as the paradigms and the policies are strictly followed, but every system has occasional breakthroughs. That's the nature of such an infectious disease. What's happened in South Australia is apparently through a door that was opened for less than a minute or two during a meal changeover. The quarantine and the tracing teams have identified that. How can you prevent some leakage? So, look, we have a system in place. People should just stop panicking, and the other side should stop ramping people's anxieties up.

If our immigration centres—which the opposition keeps saying we should have used—didn't have shared bathrooms and shared dormitories, yes, it would have been useful to convert them, but they aren't suitable. You need something like Howard Springs if you are going to set it up, and, if you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of the biggest building boom with a shortage of materials. And most of the centres are in difficult to get to locations, so, again, there's another logistical challenge.

We have provided vaccines for the nation. We've got Indigenous supply happening through CSL. We have got the Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax, which is another sort of vaccine—not a messenger RNA one but a protein based vaccine—which is possibly going to come on. We've invested in the COVAX facility. We have spent billions of dollars ensuring the doses for our population are here. If we were in some of these European countries or South American or Indian subcontinent situations where it was going rampant, sure, we could get the army in and just go round and jab them like they did in America, but we're not in that situation. We have 5,300 practices that are registered to give it. It will be run out in the later stages through pharmacies. We have 142 GP practitioner-led respiratory clinics—they're now called Commonwealth vaccination centres. We have 107 Aboriginal community controlled health centres lined up. We've got the Flying Doctor Service lined up to help distribute and administer the vaccines in really remote parts of Australia. We have a system in place. It is working. People just need to follow infection control guidelines and roll their sleeve up and get their vaccine.

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