Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

First off, I would commend the Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories for bringing these works to the table. Obviously, they are going to be bypassing the Public Works Committee, and I make no criticism there. What I am deeply concerned about and somewhat incredulous about, as a Victorian who has watched the people he represents being locked down on four occasions, and given, as the Acting Premier of Victoria says, the wicked nature of this virus, is the fact that we are doing this now, when it has been such a long period since this plague hit our shores. If you were in the outer suburbs, you had been locked down on four occasions, you had made the sacrifices that governments had asked you to make to keep the community safe, you had seen that over the forward estimates we will have a trillion dollars in debt and you had seen the economy rebounding after the work that you in those outer suburban areas and each of the states had done to keep everyone safe, you would expect a government and its Prime Minister to lead. You would think we would not be welcoming the first mention of this public works co-facility in Victoria but speaking about the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth or tenth. Fundamentally, it is stunning to me that we have a Prime Minister who basically won't lead.

Perhaps we should ask a tradie from the outer suburbs to come in here, because he or she would know what to do. Everyone knows what the difficulty is. It is that we have a hotel quarantine system that's designed to fail. Everyone knows it. We see the evidence of this in the commonsense test. Australians have great common sense, and everyone I speak to knows that hotel quarantine doesn't work. The government will say to you, 'Well, 97 per cent of people have come through.' Have a look what happens when three per cent or even one per cent gets out into the community. You cannot have a system that is city based. I have watched the buses come to the hotels in Adelaide and Melbourne, where people have decamped from the flight to the buses to the hotel. It is such a fragile system. People I've spoken to in South Australia, even though they haven't had a lot of outbreaks, know it's a fragile system. Every state premier and chief minister, if they were honest, would state that it doesn't work, that we need consolidated facilities.

Think about the money. We are over a trillion dollars in debt, and this government has been implementing short-term measures to deal with the impact of this virus hitting our shores and the disruption that it causes to our way of life. What is the long-term benefit of that trillion dollars being expended? Virtually nothing. There is no guarantee. The state premiers have fought tooth and nail to bring the Prime Minister, the leader of our country, to the table. Did the Prime Minister generate this? No, he didn't; it was the state premiers. As my colleagues from Victoria, the member for Ballarat and the member for Isaacs, have said, he had to be dragged to the table by the state premiers.

I've been here when prime ministers have led. Paul Keating was a leader, Bob Hawke was a leader and John Howard was a leader. Does Mr Morrison seriously think that if John Howard were Prime Minister he would have outsourced national security, quarantine and border protection to the states? How long would that have lasted? People say this Prime Minister is the heir apparent, but there is absolutely no way that John Howard would have allowed those things to occur. Those on the other side need to reflect on that. Leaders lead; they don't get told what to do by a focus group. This is a guy who won't get out of bed without checking the focus group to see which side of the bed he wants to get out of. That's effectively what we're facing here. This is a guy that just won't lead. This country has confronted a life-changing event, which is a plague, a virus, that is completely changing our way of life. I keep on saying that, when leaders lead, what leaders need to do is tell people how we get out of this. One of the things that I reflect on when we're looking at this measure, which has been brought to the table by the efforts of the state premiers, is: where is the leadership? We've just spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and the public still don't know where we're going. This guy's hopped in the car and is driving like Mr Magoo, all over the shop, making sure that we avoid the potholes, falling in occasionally and coming back out again. The problem is there is no leadership.

If you're in the outer suburbs, if you're that tradie that should be Prime Minister because at least you would know what to do, when you go for a job, you say: 'This is what we need to do. This is the amount of money we're spending. This is the direction.' For parents out there who are planning their kids' futures, there is no direction. The direction seems to be provided by the states. In Victoria, particularly with the second lockdown, because of the highly infectious nature of this disease, because of the fact that you have a hotel system that was designed for the short term, as the member for Ballarat said, you can understand that when we had a crisis we had to respond to a short-term measure was necessary. We will acknowledge that. But then to keep that short-term measure that was agreed upon by the national cabinet and basically go: 'We'll just keep on going. We'll just keep it there, keep it there, keep it there,' and then get dragged to the table by others, again, what I say is when you're a leader, when you sit in the highest office in the land in that chair, you lead. The Australian people give you the licence to lead them; they want to be led. They are being led by the state premiers, I might add.

The irony is that when the Prime Minister travels overseas to the United Kingdom, as he did, and they go, 'Job well done,' he should bring the state premiers and the chief ministers with him, because, in effect, the very hard measures that were needed to be taken by the community were taken by our premiers, the premiers in each of those affected states. They're still being affected, and yet the Prime Minister is still trying to avoid responsibility. At some stage, 'The buck stops with me.' The buck stops with the Prime Minister. When do you keep on handballing, Polly Farmer-like, through every window possible? At some stage you've got to say: 'I am the Prime Minister. We've asked you to do this. We're building a quarantine facility, and here's what we're going to do in the future,' because of all of those Australians who are still stranded and want to come back over; businesses basically saying they need certainty, they need a direction; and international students, which I think we need to bring back into our country, because they add to the lifeblood of tertiary institutions. To basically say to them, 'We're going to wait, and we're going to vaccinate people,'—well, we are not vaccinating people.

The point that has been made by the member for Ballarat and the member for Isaacs is this: the government had two jobs and it's done none of them. That is astonishing. In my time in this place, and it's nearly 22 years, I have never seen a government abrogate responsibility for its key mandate. If you see Maslow's hierarchy of needs and if the public votes on this in an election, they vote for a federal government to keep them safe—that's quarantine and national security—and if they're rolling out something like a national rollout, to basically do it, to implement it, to take responsibility for it and to oversee it. I've not seen a government on those two absolutely essential planks of what makes a government not do it—and then to blame them!

As long as I'm in this place I will never forget that when we were enduring the second lockdown and the aftermath after Victorians made incredible sacrifices and in a world-leading way—I think it is one of the three capital cities in the world of that size that saw off a second wave; Victorians should be incredibly proud of what they did, I was there, and the sacrifices they were making—you had two ministers from Victoria on the government side who didn't say, 'Well done, Victorians.' They basically said, 'It's the Premier's fault.'

I also remember watching the health minister, particularly when we started getting on top of the second wave lockdown, basically undermining public confidence in the measures being undertaken, the necessary measures based on the best possible health advice, by attacking Premier Andrews. If we're in this as a national fight against this virus, we're all in it. You can't hop in it. What I'm watching is them hopping in, hopping out, hopping in, hopping out. You don't try to claim victory after the victory has been earned by other people. That's not the way; it's not an Australian way. It's un-Australian.

What I have seen in this period of time—and I notice that my time is running out here—is a Prime Minister who is the least likely to lead. I've never seen a Prime Minister not lead. Well, Prime Minister, it's time for you to lead; do your job. You were elected to protect our country and to make sure that the vaccine rollout was done appropriately. You have done neither; start doing both.

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