Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We all know that our best chance of getting to some sort of COVID normal is if the government gets the vaccination program right. Vaccine is the only way Australians will be able to safely and confidently travel and for international travel to start, and it's the only way our nation can return to some sort of COVID normal.

Right now, the government's most important job—the one which should be occupying it every single minute—is to deliver vaccines as quickly and effectively as possible to communities across this country. The government has barely begun its program to roll out vaccines; it's far slower than comparable nations around the world. But instead of using this very slow start to fine tune procedures and get the rollout ready, the more we hear about the rollout the less we seem to understand how well it's going.

Last week my office was inundated with calls from residents confused by the Prime Minister's rushed announcement that they were able to book for their COVID vaccinations straightaway. This announcement was of course made before GPs were notified and before the website was even up and ready. It wasn't fair to older residents of our community and it wasn't fair to GPs and their staff, who were left trying to explain what was going on. These systems should have been tested and finalised weeks ago. Instead, all that Australians and GPs have experienced is chaos and confusion.

Our community wants to get vaccinated, but the government absolutely needs to get this right. After the rushed announcement, we have to ask what the Prime Minister was trying to do by rushing that announcement out last week. It was pretty clear that there were some other things he would have liked not to be talking about. I heard directly from a Ballarat GP clinic, and I want to quote a bit from what they had to say in my contribution. They told me that the last two weeks '… have been extremely taxing for our staff, dealing with multiple errors and incorrect advice from the staff of the Department of Health Vaccine Taskforce.' They said that the government's rushed announcement last Wednesday: '… showed a callous disregard for the staff of all the GP clinics, who were inundated with phone calls from patients when they were not able to accommodate their requests. It also shows a disregard for the Australian community. Many patients are already stressed and anxious about receiving the vaccine, and those who hung on the phone for hours, only to be told that they couldn't make an appointment yet, will be even more worried at this point.' This is directly from a GP clinic in my community.

They said that the Morrison government has shown a callous disregard for them and our community. It's an absolute indictment on what the government did last week. Last week, this single GP clinic faced a whole range of issues, and I want to quote some of these. Firstly, the fridge to be supplied by the department arrived a day after the vaccines arrived. The clinic app and booking app were not provided, so the GPs could not record vaccinations and clinical information. Sharps containers and needles were not delivered. The drawing-up needles, which were supposed to be part of the consumables as part of the contract, were not available, and when the clinic queried where they were, the department had no answer because it had not actually even thought about this as an issue. They were told to keep an eye on the portal in case they came up as an item they could order. Their account for ordering vaccines had the wrong contact name and address and they were not able to update it, and they received correspondence from the task force that was actually meant for another clinic. And the government website directed people to another site operated by the same GP clinic; the problem was that it was not the site actually offering vaccinations.

This is an incredibly important job, and the government needs to get it right if people are to have confidence in it. It's up to the Prime Minister to do his job and ensure that this vaccination program actually works. The Prime Minister told Australians that four million of us would be vaccinated by the end of March. That's not us holding that out as a target; that is the government stating that that is what it would do. They are a long, long way from that. You can't keep raising expectations to try and get yourself out of political problems when it comes to the vaccination program and then somehow expect that GPs, people trying to deliver these services and our community will not be angry about it. Prime Minister and the minister for health, it is time you did your job. (Time expired)