David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This MPI goes to the heart of the biggest issue facing the nation. The vaccine rollout has been ramping up exponentially. As the Minister for Health outlined, we were ahead of the curve in getting agreements in place. Mr Deputy Speaker, do you realise we had 280 million doses of vaccines on order? That's 280 million people. That's about 10 shots for every Australian person. But the best-laid plans were put awry by the European Union blocking delivery of 3.7 million vaccines from AstraZeneca in Europe.

Many people have criticised us for not getting more Pfizer. The whole American production was left for America. We had deals with Pfizer, with Novavax, with Moderna. Once we got the supply we delivered. Twelve point six million doses have been delivered. As you can remember, the start of the rollout was full of these supply problems. In the first half month there were only 34,000 doses. But in the last two weeks we have had exponentially increasing doses. There were over a million doses the last month—going up to 1.2 million. It's now nudging 1.4 million in the same period. It is absolutely exponentially expanding.

In regional Australia we've had 2,261,000 doses delivered. We've got 1,079 general practices and 108 Aboriginal community controlled health organisations. We've got 59 Commonwealth vaccination centres. We're rolling out in pharmacies much quicker than was originally outlined. Another ramp-up will be seen once we get the community pharmacies. There are state-based systems that are doing megacentres—even in my electorate. The moral of the story is: we have delivered in spades.

The $300 incentive cash payment is a thought bubble. It is not a good policy in any shape or form. The main incentive is for people to know that they are going to get—$300 cash giveaways are sort of like the Pink Batts in vaccine land. It's counter-productive. Are you going to give a cash bonus for measles and mumps and for tetanus? For goodness sake, this is an absolute thought bubble.

They're criticising us about our quarantine system. We have delivered exponential growth in quarantine accommodation in the Northern Territory. We're entering into MOUs with Victoria. We're looking at a new centre in Queensland and in New South Wales. All these things are underway. We have had a hotel quarantine system that has had less than one per cent of the cases identified. It has worked very well. When you consider over 409,000 people have been through hotel quarantine our quarantine system has only had small breakouts. It is exponentially increasing.

If it wasn't for general practices, for pharmacies and for hospital systems with dedicated workers with their shoulders to the wheel, doing this day in, day out—we've even had the flying doctor delivering vaccines. We've had contractors going into aged-care facilities. We've had all sorts of delivery mechanisms. You can see that exponential ramp-up in the delivery of vaccines. I think the plan of getting to 70 per cent and then to 80 per cent will happen a lot quicker, because as more of the GPs who have been enrolled—there are 5,000 eligible and there are over 3,600 pharmacies. You'll see it go through the roof, and that's before we even have Moderna and more vaccines delivered to this country. (Time expired)

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