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

I withdraw. The Prime Minister said that we are on a war footing. But apparently this doesn't apply to the vaccine rollout or quarantine. If it did, we would be making proper use of our defence assets. If Labor was in government, we'd look at things like RAAF Base Learmonth as a priority to make sure we had the capacity to get these pensioners home so that we wouldn't have to send the cashless pension cards and payments overseas. Instead, we could just bring them home. That would also mean that they could spend their pension here in Australia and support Australian small businesses. But quarantine, despite being a Commonwealth responsibility, is not a priority, even though pensioners are stuck overseas saying, 'We want to come home; we want to get back to where we grew up, where we worked all our lives and where we can see our families and our grandkids.' We know that the Halton report recommended a purpose-built facility in Western Australia, but, because this government is so stubborn and so determined to ignore the expert advice, our nation is stuck. Premier McGowan has said very clearly that he would like to see 'a facility next to an international-capacity airport'. It's been suggested that Exmouth or Busselton could be the location. Premier McGowan said:

… there's those sorts of places that are outside of the very heavily populated inner city of Perth, but the Commonwealth shows no appetite.

I just can't understand why you would choose to leave the most dangerous bits of quarantine in the middle of our CBD after we've had so many pieces of evidence that it doesn't work. I know what that means to the pensioners who live in my electorate: they are left vulnerable to these quarantine leaks which we see time and time again. They haven't had their full vaccination schedule. The information coming out of this government is light to non-existent at best, although I understand that every pensioner in my electorate next month will receive a personalised letter from the Prime Minister telling them about the vaccine schedule and why they should get vaccinated. When pensioners need a vaccine and the government's solution is to give them a letter from the Prime Minister, I think that just shows how badly the rollout of the vaccination schedule has gone.

The government has failed when it comes to the confidence that is needed in the vaccine rollout. This is a huge problem that this government fails to address. It's great that we've got this legislation, and it is very important for a very small number of people, but I'd also expect the government to do something for the very large number of people who are waiting for them to actually step up on the two jobs that they should be focusing on day in, day out: quarantine and vaccines. If you get quarantine right and you get vaccines right, we won't need legislation like this and we can bring the pensioners who are stuck overseas home. We can make sure they're spending that money here in Australia and we can reconnect Australian families who have been stuck apart for more than a year because of the incompetence of this government.

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