Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sure, I withdraw. And then she said, 'We made the right decisions; it's effective.' The right decision would have been getting the vaccines here and not being the last in the developed world. The right decision would have been taking their responsibility under the Constitution for quarantine and having a safe national quarantine system, not one that has leaked 27 times causing tens of billions of dollars of damage and hundreds of Australians to lose their lives.

But we only need to look down the road from this parliament to see the scale of this national disaster. There is chaos right now in the national capital. What's the time, Mr Deputy Speaker Wallace? In 48 minutes our national capital goes into lockdown—the ACT and Canberra. Could there be a more dramatic end to this session of parliament than the national capital succumbing to delta? The Prime Minister told us that he's on a war footing against the virus. Well, for weeks he has been warned that delta is coming and he has done nothing. He has watched it marching across regional New South Wales, taking town by town and coming to Canberra because there was no ring of steel around Sydney, and he failed to act and protect the ACT.

If this is the Prime Minister's war, he's losing the national capital. He prides himself on national security but he cannot secure the national capital, and the impact could be enormous. This population here is unvaccinated. It's the centre of government and national administration. It's the seat of the Defence Forces and it's the centre of our democracy. But as others have observed in the media it would quite well suit the Prime Minister if the parliament couldn't sit, so he could hide from scrutiny. Every day he comes in here he has to be accountable for his rorts, his waste and his corruption. A fish rots from the head, as has been said, and this Prime Minister sits right at the centre of the spider web, pulling the threads with little coloured spreadsheets and pushing the money out to the marginal seats. But he has failed on those two most critical of jobs and the tests that he set for himself this year: vaccines and quarantine.

When the pressure is on, though, he does one of two things: he runs away and hides or he blames someone else. The question now, for the next couple of weeks is: will Australians even see him? He might be back under the doona! Remember that he went missing over the winter break—he just kept disappearing. We actually had to put up 'missing' posters to see if anyone had seen him! Or will he come out of hiding and find new people to blame. As Niki Savva said today in TheAge, 'a cranky man in need of a plan'. That was her headline. She reported him yelling and swearing and shouting like a petulant child on a phone call with the Treasurer of New South Wales—a Liberal guy trying to negotiate a business package. The Prime Minister got upset about who was going to take the credit for the package. Then, as a cabinet minister is quoted about the leadership of his own Prime Minister: 'If you see a problem, throw money at it. If you see a problem, walk away from it. If you see a problem, duck-shove it to someone else.' That's what his ministers say about him! He yells and swears and screams at his friends in the New South Wales Liberal government.

Don't be fooled—Australians should not be fooled by his 'daggy dad' persona and by the little guy with the baseball cap hammering the chook shed. He's a nasty, angry fake and he's not up to his job, as the whole country has seen. But he's not just a shapeshifter, he's a blame shifter. He's not a leader, he's a very cunning politician—he is the master of the blame game. Instead of acknowledging his mistakes he just finds someone else to blame.

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