Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

One of the finest people to ever serve in this parliament, and indeed the parliament down the hill, was Kim Beazley. When I used to work for Kim Beazley some 15 years ago one of the sayings that I would hear him say often, which I found quite amusing, was: 'That mob over there couldn't organise a kick in a street fight.' I was thinking about that today when the Treasurer had two opportunities and two Dorothy Dixers. First he was asked a question about fiscal discipline. He had three minutes and didn't mention fiscal discipline once. Then he was asked a question about tax and he couldn't answer it, because the question was so poorly written. I was thinking, at that moment, if these characters over there can't even organise two Dorothy Dixers no wonder they can't organise vaccines or purpose-built quarantine.

What a farce it has been watching them try and explain and slither out of this mess that they have made of the two jobs that the Prime Minister had to do this year. I tell you what they can organise, they can put together a decent looking press conference. We saw this spectacle yesterday here in this building. We had the military uniforms. We had the fancy PowerPoint slide. We had the Prime Minister walk out with his puffed-up self-importance, with his little mate from Melbourne looking all solemn as well. All of this cooked up—all of this production, all of this spectacle—just to tell us what everybody else in the country, and certainly everybody on this side of the House already knew, just to fess up and admit what the rest of us have been saying for months: lockdowns are the only way to deal with this virus in the absence of a proper vaccine rollout and those lockdowns are smashing the national economy of Australia. They didn't quite admit that they had been wrong all of this time. It was more that they kind of hoped that we wouldn't notice that they have been wrong all of this time.

How much of this economic destruction could have been avoided if they already understood these basic truths? How much of the human cost, how much of the economic cost could have been averted if they understood all along that what really matters here is the vaccine rollout? In the absence of a good one we will have more lockdowns and with lockdowns there will be lots of damage done to workers, small businesses and the national economy.

When it comes to lockdowns it's hard to take the Treasurer seriously. The same guy who was there yesterday saying, 'It turns out that lockdowns are really important to protect the economy and protect people from the virus,' is the same joker who stood at that dispatch box, and up in the Canberra press gallery here in the Parliament House building, and ranted and raved about the biggest public policy failure of our lifetime being Daniel Andrews having to lockdown the Victorian economy. This was the same guy who ranted and raved from that dispatch box about lockdowns. This was the same Prime Minister who was congratulating, indeed encouraging, Premier Berejiklian not to lockdown, saying it was the gold standard not to lockdown. And we all know how costly that error has been when we look at the hundreds of cases each day that we see in New South Wales and more specifically in Sydney.

When it comes to vaccines, we asked over and over again today about aged-care workers. The Prime Minister finally admitted that they're at least four months late and 44 per cent short, and that's just on the first shot—the promise they made to have workers vaccinated by Easter. This is part of the broader failure when it comes to vaccines. We are well behind where we need to be as a country as a consequence of the failures of those opposite.

We asked about the economy as well. We asked them specifically, 'What are the costs and consequences of the Prime Minister's failure to do those two jobs—vaccines and purpose-built quarantine?' Billions of dollars a week are being shed from the national economy, on the government's own figures, because of the mess that they've made of vaccines and quarantine—every single week. This is the price tag on this government's incompetence. This is the price that ordinary Australian working families and local communities are being asked to pay for the Prime Minister's inability to do those two jobs this year. This Prime Minister is the dill that Australia can't afford. These costs and consequences of the Prime Minister's failure are being carried by the ordinary women and men of this country.

We have said all along, even at the beginning of the recovery earlier this year when Australia was emerging from the first recession in almost 30 years, the worst one in almost a century, that we welcomed that progress but that the recovery was always hostage to the ability of the government to roll out vaccines effectively and build that quarantine. We said all along that you couldn't have a first-rate recovery with a third-rate vaccine rollout, and that has proven to be the case. We're seeing that right now.

Those opposite must be from another planet in talking about how well the economy's going when, at the same time, the Treasurer has repeatedly admitted that the economy is currently shrinking in this quarter and he can't rule out—in his words—'a second recession in the second year'. The Treasurer himself can't rule that out. I don't know where they get the front, frankly, to come in here and tell the Australian people, through the Australian parliament, that their economy is going gangbusters. After everything that Australians have done for each other to limit the spread of the virus—Australians have done their bit—all they ask is that the government does their bit as well.

The Prime Minister has taken to using Olympic analogies all of a sudden. He said it wasn't a race, but now, because the focus group report is in, he wants to talk about the Olympics. He knows that Australians are proud of our Olympics team, so he is using Olympic analogies. They are at risk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when it comes to the vaccine rollout. We did make an amazing start as a country in 2020. That's a credit to our people and what they did for each other, and that advantage has been squandered. We were leading on the first lap and now we have stumbled on the second lap as a consequence of his failures.

The Australian people are working this Prime Minister out. They know that this farce when it comes to vaccines and quarantine says so much. It's a real window into the soul of this government. It says so much about the character of this government and the man who leads it, and Australians are working that out. They see all of the arrogance that we see here in question time, all of the complacency and all of this sense that any question asked about any of these important issues is some kind of personal affront to the Prime Minister—how dare we ask all of these questions! They see all of these efforts to avoid and evade responsibility when it comes to the job that the Australian people pay him to do.

I think the Australian people are working out that the man who sits over there, the Prime Minister of this country, is temperamentally unsuited for the role of leadership. He is psychologically incapable of taking responsibility for these failures which are bleeding the Australian economy at the moment because of all of these lockdowns caused by his failures on vaccines and quarantine. And now he's forced into these humiliating concessions that lockdowns are important. Lockdowns are because of the failure on vaccines. The failure on vaccines is his fault, and that's costing the Australian economy dearly.

Over and over again today he was asked about our constructive alternative, to say, 'We have got two issues in this country at the moment—the economy is bleeding and it needs help and the vaccine rollout is bleeding and needs help—and we could deal with both of those things at once. We could provide a shot in the arm for the vaccine rollout and a shot in the arm for workers and small businesses in the economy at the same time.' We could do that. Of course, true to form, despite the fact that General Frewen said only a couple of hours ago in this building that the government themselves are discussing and considering cash incentives for vaccines, the Prime Minister is in a rush to rule that out. And we dealt with that at some level today, and some of the important conclusions we can draw from it.

The Prime Minister pretends all of a sudden that $6 billion is a lot of money, in his book, despite the fact that he wasted $13 billion on JobKeeper for companies whose profits were rising and who didn't need help, wasted all that money on the car park rorts, which my colleagues have done so well to uncover, and wasted all that money on sport rorts, dodgy land deals and all the rest of it. The most wasteful government since Federation sits over there at the moment. After all of that, he wants to pretend that $6 billion invested in fixing his vaccine failures and the mess that those opposite have made of the economy is not money well spent. Well, we think it is money well spent. In fact, there could hardly be a more responsible use of taxpayer money than fixing the vaccine rollout, trying to prevent these lockdowns and trying to avert the economic carnage that is a consequence of his failures. So spare us the lectures about economic responsibility from the most wasteful government since Federation! What we're proposing is a fraction of the cost of the damage that his incompetence and ineptitude, and the Treasurer's as well, is doing to the Australian economy. The sooner we fix vaccines and the sooner we fix lockdowns, the sooner we fix the economy as well.

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