Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

The lion's share of the consequences of the latest Sydney lockdown lie squarely at the feet of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had two jobs this year: to get and roll out vaccines quickly and to set up national quarantine. He failed at both. His failures saw the virus spread through eastern Sydney and eventually make its way out west. The lack of access to vaccines led to 7,000 people that I represent catching COVID. Throughout this lockdown we saw the tale of two cities: the eastern suburbs of Sydney, which had one set of restrictions, and then the west with a completely different set. Police enforced curfews, there were helicopters over homes, five-kilometre travel restrictions and movement caps.

Throughout the lockdown, the area I represent needed the federal and state government on their side doing the right thing to help them. My office was getting regular calls from local residents who, despite being eligible for a COVID vaccine, were unable to get one because GPs had no vaccines or didn't have enough, and we had no mass vaccination hubs. People wanted to get vaccinated, which made it so infuriating to hear governments blaming low vaccination rates in our area on hesitancy. Not true! In July we wrote to the New South Wales government, offering community facilities for vaccination hubs. That fell on deaf ears. We wrote to the feds, asking for assistance from the ADF to help set up and run vaccination hubs to help with the vaccine rollout. That fell on deaf ears. The health minister said—remarkably, in our nation's parliament—that we didn't need them because GPs and pharmacists were there.

The reality was, and bear this in mind, that pharmacists were trained in February to administer this vaccine and they did not get their supply until August. That is the truth. And when was the time at which the vaccination rates in Western Sydney were celebrated widely? They skyrocketed from August. It was clear proof that lack of supply, not hesitancy, led to this. And 60 per cent of the deaths in Western and south-western Sydney were experienced in our area as a result of people catching COVID. It shouldn't have happened, people knew we could have avoided it and they didn't do it. It really irks me to hear how the federal government celebrates these huge vax rates when they were so sluggish and so inept, and unable to get the vaccines—to do their job and supply them to people in need, particularly in the vulnerable communities that I represent. It shouldn't have been that way.

But, while this has tested our community, I also want to recognise that it brought us closer together. I want to put on the record, the heartfelt gratitude of our community to the GPs, the pharmacists, the nurses, the pathologists and all the allied health staff, who did an incredible job in administering that vaccine under trying circumstances. They saved lives and we are eternally grateful.

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