Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] In the few moments I have I want to respond to some of the comments made by the member for Fisher in this debate. The Morrison government needs to stop trying to politicise this debate. Labor is doing the job that Australians have asked of it—to hold the government to account, to call for transparency and to highlight where the government could be doing better on behalf of the Australian people that they govern. Yet, when we do that, the Prime Minister, the government and the member for Fisher right now say that we are talking down the government's response to COVID. No. We all desperately want the government to succeed, and we are pointing out how they could do just that. Australians know that when the government is talking about Labor they are just trying to distract from their own failures and how the Morrison government has let Australians down.

When we come to this legislation, the question must be asked: why are we only just debating legislation like this now? Why is the government only just introducing legislation to manage the pandemic and the rollout, to secure vaccines and associated required goods? Legislation realistically should have hit this parliament by at least this time last year when other nations were having conversations about securing their vaccines. We should have been having this conversation over a year ago. This necessary legislation does not excuse the Morrison government's failures, but of course we support it, as we have supported all of the action that has been taken to help Australians manage their way through this pandemic. Indeed, we are the party that have called for many of those measures that the government eventually ended up adopting to support Australians through this pandemic.

The PM needs to stop responding after the fact, after the last minute—too little, too late—and actually start delivering for Australians right now, because for this Prime Minister every problem ends up being somebody else's fault; every crisis is somebody else's responsibility. Australians have been plunged into uncertainty and disruption because of a quarantine system that is far from fit for purpose and a slow vaccine rollout that everyone is experiencing. He said it's not a race. Well, we all know that it is a race. But for this Prime Minister, who always acts after the fact, always after the last minute, everything is truly too little too late in his approach.

The Prime Minister did have two key jobs this year. In fact, they are jobs that he should have been working on last year.

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