Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] We must come out of lockdown, but we must do it safely, and the frustrating thing in the situation that we are presented with today is: had the Prime Minister stuck with the original vaccination targets, had he stuck with his original plan, we would already have between 70 and 80 per cent of our country fully vaccinated. The Prime Minister threw his hands in the air; he said it was all too hard and that no-one could talk about targets and no-one could talk about the targets that he had set for his own government. But now we are paying the price for that failure of leadership and we are paying the price because we didn't stick to the original plan of getting people vaccinated as quickly as possible.

The way out of our lockdowns is through leadership and not blame-shifting. We need leadership to vaccinate as many people as possible, not to shift the blame and create political fights as the Prime Minister is doing right now. Cutting corners, as the Prime Minister did, is not going to work; it will only mean people end up in hospital, very, very sick. We must do everything we can on all of the mitigating factors. We must do everything we can to protect children so that, when we do come out of lockdown, we do it with purpose and we do it without the risk of going back into lockdown, and we do it in a way that is going to save as many lives as possible.

Finally, I want to say thank you to all of the locals in my electorate who got tested and are lining up to get vaccinated. Thank you for showing the leadership that our Prime Minister has failed to show. (Time expired)

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