Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to start my remarks by saying thank you to the people of Victoria, who are doing work on behalf of the entire nation right now. Every Australian stands with you. Those of us who don't live in Victoria don't know exactly the pain that you feel on the news today that you will continue your lockdown, but there are many millions of Australians who support you.

There are also Australians who just do not understand how this government continues to make so many mistakes. They can deliver cuts, but they can't deliver a jab. They can stab Malcolm Turnbull in the back, but they can't jab the population. And when we needed the ad-man Prime Minister—when we needed his advertising skills, at the most pressing time—he couldn't deliver the ad campaign the nation needs to boost vaccine confidence. The Prime Minister had two jobs: quarantine and vaccine delivery. Vaccines save lives—if you can get your hands on them. In politics, we all know—we've learnt in different ways in this place—that a small prick can make a big difference. Vaccines prove that point.

It's been 100 days since the Prime Minister got his vaccine. We saw the photo op. We saw him doing the peace symbol. Even I sort of hoped that things were going to get moving—but they didn't. We just saw the photo op; we didn't see any action to get the vaccine rollout moving. The United Kingdom got Elton John and the United States got Dolly Parton—and we got the Prime Minister. Maybe it's time that he texts Julie Bishop again and says, 'Can I have Tina Arena's number; I need to ask her for help with a public information campaign.'

The Prime Minister says, 'It's not a race.' I've heard the Prime Minister say many, many times, 'It's not a race.' He's not the only person in my life who says, 'It's not a race.' My three-year-old Leo, when he is losing at anything—when he can't eat his dinner as quick as I can or when he can't get into his pyjamas quick enough or whatever—he goes, 'It's not a race, daddy; it's not a race,' and, for him, that's totally fine. But we are racing against a virus, and we've seen—in terms of what's happening in Victoria—just how quickly it can race ahead of us when we become at all complacent.

The Prime Minister says, 'It's not a race.' He promised 16 pop-up vaccination clinics. Three of them are open and they are all in Sydney. None of these pop-up clinics are in any other state or in any other capital—just in Sydney. We know that there is a problem with the way the Prime Minister sees the country, because he does look to preference New South Wales. I remember when the New South Wales Premier said in the media that the Prime Minister was 'sympathetic' to putting New South Wales ahead of other states in the vaccine distribution queue. That, of course, requires having a vaccine distribution plan, though.

We're not even in the top 100 nations for vaccine distribution. It takes a very special type of incompetence to find something slower than the NBN that this government rolled out, but they've found it: they had an even slower vaccine rollout. Only 8.74 per cent of aged-care staff are fully vaccinated. Only 1.5 per cent of disability care residents are fully vaccinated. We still have no plan for national distribution of the vaccine for our schoolteachers or for our early childhood educators—people who have high contact with vulnerable Australians.

Then it comes to the failure of hotel quarantine. There have been 21 outbreaks from hotel quarantine—the latest in my electorate of Perth, at the Pan Pacific hotel. The workers at the Pan Pacific hotel do a fabulous job. They have not only felt the huge economic whack of COVID; they've also stepped up to help. But what they need to see is that we provide other options for quarantine. You could look to do something in Learmonth or Esperance or you could look—as the Premier of Western Australia has suggested today—to do something in Busselton or in south-west WA. You can't avoid the fact that hotel quarantine did an amazing job in 2020, but it is broken for the challenge we face in 2021, and the government needs to step up. This government needs to take responsibility. Even if it's just acknowledging that it is the one responsible for vaccines and it is the one responsible for quarantine, it would be a huge step in the right direction.

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