Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today the people of Victoria, including all those in my electorate of Corangamite, remain in lockdown. Each day, we've seen a rising number of COVID cases and great uncertainty about when the lockdown will end. I stand with my fellow Victorians at this time of great anxiety, frustration, loneliness and heartbreak, and self-sacrifice, and urge you to stay strong. We will get through this, but it will be with little help from the complacent Morrison government that refuses to help Victorian workers and struggling businesses during this lockdown. Once again, it's the Daniel Andrews government that has stepped up and announced $250 million to support Victorians.

But this dangerous complacency is not just about the Morrison government's failure to implement safe quarantine facilities. It's also about the woeful vaccine rollout. We are not even in the top 100 countries when it comes to vaccination rollouts. It's a scandal that, while all residents of aged care were promised full vaccination by Easter, there remain several hundred aged-care facilities in Victoria that have only received one dose; they need two. The result of such negligence is a fourth lockdown for people in Victoria, with students missing school, parents homeschooling, businesses struggling without the support of the federal government, and high levels of stress and heartbreak. Aged-care workers have contracted the virus because they've had to work at multiple facilities. It's been 463 days since the first domestic case of COVID-19. There are no excuses for the government's inaction.

This latest outbreak comes from interstate hotel quarantine. It's the 17th outbreak of its kind. Hotels aren't designed for quarantine. They're designed for tourists. In October last year, the Prime Minister was handed a report by the former Health secretary, Jane Halton. The report was the National review of hotel quarantine. It outlined serious concerns about the potential for aerosol transmissions in hotels and poor ventilation in hotels—built for tourism, not medical quarantine. This was an issue that needed to be resolved. Several months later, nothing has changed.

The Morrison government could have included funding for a national quarantine facility in the last budget—or in the one before that—but, hey, we had zero cases nationwide, so why bother, right? At every chance, this government has shirked its responsibility for quarantine, despite the Constitution stating quite clearly that it's the responsibility of the federal government. The Prime Minister only had two jobs this year. Firstly, it was to fix national quarantine. He failed that. Secondly, it was the timely rollout of the vaccine. We're now in June, officially the start of winter, and we're not even close to the population being vaccinated. The Prime Minister said, 'This is not a race.' He is wrong. It is a race against the virus, a virus that is shifting and changing every day, making it harder for us to defeat it and for us to enable 6.8 million Victorians to get out of lockdown.

As it stands, there's no public health campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated. This government can't even vaccinate our most vulnerable and the people who care for them. For example, did you know that only 355, or 1.4 per cent, of Australians living in residential disability accommodation have been fully vaccinated? Residential aged-care facilities in my region report average staff vaccination rates of less than 30 per cent. Today in Senate estimates we learnt that 21 Australian aged-care facilities still haven't received a single dose. What is more, the responsible minister is misleading the Australian people day after day to hide their bad failings. Imagine that: prioritising spin over lies and livelihoods. This is a disgrace.

We are dangerously behind schedule because this government has been incompetent and complacent. One only needs to look at the national cabinet. It was only in April that the Prime Minister triumphantly declared the national cabinet was on a war footing. Now, the country's second-largest state is being thrown into yet another lockdown, and the national cabinet is not even meeting until later this week. It's about time the Prime Minister stepped up and stopped blaming the states when things don't go well. You only have to look to Victoria where acting Premier James Merlino put it best: 'There is only one path to defeating this pandemic—that is, through the successful rollout of the Commonwealth vaccine program and an alternative to hotel quarantine.' Time to step up, time to show up and get things done, or perhaps it's time for another government to do the job.

See this speech in context