Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, before I start, I've been provided with additional information by the member for New England subsequent to a point of order that I made during question time. I want to unconditionally withdraw the allegation I made with respect to the member for New England. I want to put that down at the start. I do not in any way, though, resile from the fury when the Prime Minister is seeking to claim poor motivations on the part of the Labor Party when we are fighting for our communities.

When we hear the previous speech claiming that somehow Labor is trying to drag down the government response, or we hear the Prime Minister claim, 'It doesn't matter how you start the race,' can I tell you: it matters, because our communities are living that neglect right now. The Prime Minister started badly, and then, because of the actions of the state premiers overruling him on lockdowns and keeping us safe last year, he went on a victory lap and didn't turn up for the second half. What has that meant in our communities now?

The Prime Minister should go and try to tell the people who are homeschooling, where English isn't their first language and they're in homes where there are more people than rooms, that it doesn't matter how they started the race. His neglect is why they're in that situation now. He should go and tell the people in the construction industry, who are wondering what's going to happen to their book of jobs, that it doesn't matter how you start the race. They're in a mess right now financially because of his neglect. He should tell the people at Canterbury Hospital, as we start to watch the wards fill up because of what's happening now, that it really doesn't matter because people are going to be vaccinated in the months to come.

Then we hear people blame our communities, saying, 'They're hard to communicate with.' We had somebody sleep overnight in the middle of winter outside Lakemba Mosque to try to make sure he was first in the vaccination queue for the next day. We had people turning up to Bankstown Sports Club being sent away at the end of the day because they weren't able to get vaccinated. Right now, for us here in Canberra, people are talking about getting vaccinated to try to make sure we're guarded against the future. People are desperate in Sydney and in Melbourne, and, we're about to find, in the ACT right now, and all around the country from time to time, where the vaccination issue isn't about the future; it's about right now and the frustration that it wasn't available the month before that, or the month before that or the month before that.

Think of the people who work in construction. What's thought in Sydney, where you can't go to work unless you're vaccinated? I've had two people now contact my office whose medical advice because of pre-existing conditions is that there is only one vaccine their GP is recommending for them. They are now being told they can't go to work for six to eight weeks. Why? Because this Prime Minister didn't do his job. That's not a political slogan. That's a lived reality in lockdown areas right now.

How do you think it got into the community were it not for failures of quarantine? We still have a situation where, if you're not at Howard Springs, quarantine is happening in the most populated parts of our nation, in facilities that were built for tourism—this is for an airborne virus. Vaccination is the way out of this; we get that. But the government didn't do world's best practice. Please don't tell me that we should be proud of having record days of vaccination when we are starting from a base that has left our biggest cities as disaster zones. We now have the fear in far western New South Wales that something we had kept out of remote First Nations communities for so long could be there. That would not have been the same risk if the Prime Minister had done his job on quarantine and vaccination. Please don't think this is a slogan. It's a lived reality. Please don't think the anger is a game. It is a frustration, because we're here right now not just wanting a better deal for our communities; we want them to be alive. We want the members of our communities to not end up in intensive care; we want them to be able to go to work. And they are questioning whether these things are going to happen for a very simple reason: the Prime Minister didn't do his job.

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