Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This government and this Prime Minister had two key jobs in 2021: to roll out the vaccine effectively and to fix national quarantine, and both of them have been botched. They've been botched as a result of the complacency and arrogance of this government, a government that's been too busy patting itself on the back, saying that we're at the front of the queue and a government that has missed every single target it had in place, so now it's given up. Now it just has a horizon and we know that the irony there is that horizons are never ever reached. The government doesn't seem to have understood that.

Of course, we have a Prime Minister who during the last crisis Australia faced, during the bushfires, said he 'doesn't hold a hose'. This time around, he says, 'It's not a race.' Well, it is a race. Other countries understand that, which is why they did five or six deals with vaccine producers last year. We were saying, through myself, through our shadow health minister, through others in the Labor Party, that the government needed to look at best practice, and it was ignored. We were told we're at the front of the queue, and we're way at the back, not even in the top 100. We were told essential workers would all be done early on, that stage 1a, including people who work in aged care, who work in disability care and aged-care residents, would all be done by Easter. They still haven't been done. We know that there's just three per cent of Australians who have been vaccinated and there are no national quarantine facilities. This is a government led by a man who literally, according to his photo ops, is all hammer and no nail, with no substance when it comes down to actually delivering—a virtual Prime Minister this week, where you'd get more sense and responsibility from a screensaver! You'd get more answers from a screensaver!

The fact is we are in the middle of a pandemic. The biggest city in the continent is the latest to be hit by the effects of COVID-19. But what we got from this government again today was more display of self-arrogance, in contrast to the New South Wales Premier who does understand that it's a race, who does understand that it's urgent. Every premier and chief minister, Labor and Liberal, have all been out there saying: 'We want quarantine facilities. We want greater supply.' We actually had this week, in response to Senate estimates, a question of: why is it you haven't run out a public information campaign? The answer, unbelievably, 18 months into this pandemic, was that if you had a public information campaign that encouraged vaccinations then the vaccines wouldn't be available. That was actually the response!

After the current Prime Minister rolled the former Prime Minister, he spoke in this chamber about how the curtain has come down on the muppet show. Remember that? Well, the muppet show continues, and we have a new deputy muppet in town as a result of this week. The member for New England, the only bloke who can gatecrash his own party, has gatecrashed it this week. The Nationals have thrown away whatever flimsy claim they have had to being the voice of the bush. We have a mouse plague causing devastation in regional communities, but the only mice that they're worried about are the rats in their own rank. That has been their obsession this week. They had a challenge during the bushfire crisis on the very day in which we had a motion before this parliament paying tribute to emergency service workers, and now, this week, a challenge in the midst of a pandemic when you have all of this happening, a challenge now led by a Deputy Prime Minister who said this about the coalition to The Age:

To tell you the truth, I have never really liked Liberals much. They all think they have something special happening in their lunchbox.

Now, the second sentence needs a translator, but the first is pretty clear, because just a day into the job there were the Nats in the Senate and then here, in the House of Reps, trying to shred the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. They're just trying to rip it up. It's an extraordinary spectacle and one that I've never seen in this chamber, of members of a government trying to move amendments to government legislation after consultation with other cabinet ministers, including the minister for water. Well, the test for the Prime Minister is: who will hold the water portfolio next week? Because if Minister Pitt remains with that job then that says it all.

We see conflict after conflict within the coalition. Today it's about water, but also, of course, there's all the conflict about net zero emissions by 2050, which they can't agree on. We have a Deputy Prime Minister who has net zero admissions when it comes to the problems that he has with women in his own party and the problem that he has from senior people, who have worked so closely with him, saying that he is not a suitable person for that job. Two state National Party leaders, a party trustee, a former chair of the Nationals women's council, the founder of Women in Agriculture and multiple MPs all say that he's not appropriate.

We have a Deputy Prime Minister who says that investment in renewables is 'insane'. That is what he has said. He's also said, of course, that nuclear power plants should be built in the middle of towns, including in regional Australia. Any town that has a hill, he says, should have a nuclear power plant. We look forward to campaigning on that. They're even divided over child care. This week in their party room someone actually put the view that child care was outsourcing parenting. How out of touch are they? At this time we have a major crisis, including the stepped-up crisis in New South Wales this week. We've had lockdowns around the country. We continue to have a failure to roll out the vaccine effectively. We've had changes to information, including the change that's been made in the last 24 hours to information concerning AstraZeneca.

We have a major problem, in spite of the fact that we've constructively put forward a four-point plan. We've been campaigning on it for a year: roll out the vaccine effectively, make sure you have national quarantine facilities, make sure you have a public information campaign and manufacture mRNA vaccines here in Australia. That's Labor at our best, being constructive, putting forward policy ideas to help the government. It was Labor, of course, who put forward the proposals for JobKeeper, which kept the economy going during that period. We had the absurdity this week of the New South Wales government putting forward a plan for electric vehicles, but the federal government is led by people who said that electric vehicles would destroy the weekend, would mean the end of the weekend. What we have in those opposite is a political party, a political movement, that is in chaos. They don't like each other within their parties, they don't like each other between the parties and they can barely go through a day in parliament without the dissent being on full display for all to see. What we need is for those opposite to sit in opposition on this side of the House because they act like the opposition in exile sitting on the government benches. They don't have a plan for the future.

We on this side of the House have a plan. We have a plan to grow back stronger and to recognise that the pandemic has exposed some of the vulnerabilities in our economy. We have a plan for the need to build more things here and to make sure that we create an Australian skills agenda so that Australians can fill those job opportunities. We have a plan to drive productivity growth through child care and other measures. We have a plan to invest in social housing and to not leave Australians behind. We have a plan to take the opportunities for good action on climate change to create jobs as well as to lower energy prices and lower emissions. That's our plan for the future. Those opposite just have chaos. If you can't govern yourselves, if you're coming into the parliament and moving motions against government legislation, then it's all over. What we'll see is that descent into chaos because this Deputy Prime Minister is simply not up to the job, and it's an admission that they're not up to the task. (Time expired)

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