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

I rise this evening to acknowledge the fact that this pandemic has been a long and hard time for Australians, especially for Victorians. Victoria is my home state. I want to start my remarks by thanking Victorians for their efforts, because every single time there is a lockdown and every single time there are restrictions or case numbers or exposure sites being released by the Victorian health authorities, Victorians respond incredibly. They respond in huge testing numbers and they do the right thing not just for themselves but for all Victorians. And, yes, the Victorian government, the Victorian health authorities, the contact tracers and everyone have worked tirelessly throughout this pandemic, but Victorians have done everything that they could possibly have been asked for and more.

It has been a truly difficult year for the great state of Victoria, and I want to start by acknowledging and thanking everyone and all of the businesses who have made sacrifices and chosen to close or have closed because it is the right thing to do. As this pandemic has gone on and progressed, what we have seen from the federal government is, successively, a withdrawal of responsibility and of involvement in the managing of this pandemic. Credit where the credit's due: in the early days of this pandemic, when there was a lot of uncertainty going around and we were watching the Prime Minister after the national cabinet meetings—late at night, even at 10 o'clock—making announcements, saying that there were going to be limits on gatherings and people's homes and that institutions would be shut down, it was the Prime Minister and the chief medical officer of this country making those announcements. It was the Prime Minister who did it in the early days. The Prime Minister also announced, with the Treasurer—I remember it well, that press conference—that there would be a wage subsidy. They also announced there would be a coronavirus supplement for those who had lost their jobs. I was impressed with the way in which the government was handling this pandemic early on. There was a willingness to be front and centre and a willingness to support Australians.

But as this pandemic has gone on and become tougher and tougher, what we have seen is the Prime Minister and this government systematically walking away from responsibility and walking away from supporting Australians. The Prime Minister no longer does announcements on restrictions. The Prime Minister completely walked away from the management of the pandemic. Last sitting week, he said in this place that those decisions are matters for the states. That is a decision that the Prime Minister made. He made it during the stage 4 lockdown in Victoria last year, when, instead of being in the middle of the political storm and the difficulty that the stage 4 lockdown presented, the Prime Minister decided that he wasn't going to insert himself into that problem; he was going to stand on the sidelines and observe and comment on the decisions made by the Victorian government. Politically, I can understand why the Prime Minister did that, but that is not leadership. That is not the leadership that this country needed.

The Prime Minister said that the app was going to be our ticket to freedom. He urged all Australians to download the app, and, when the app didn't work, the Prime Minister decided he wasn't going to bother to try and fix it. The Prime Minister was willing to do press releases and press announcements, time after time, on the vaccine rollout. He said Australians were at the head of the queue. The health minister even said that the eagle had landed. What we now know is that this vaccine rollout was ill thought out. They were ill prepared. They have not rolled this out properly. Victorians today are being forced to delay their bookings for the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The government had the opportunity to secure Pfizer doses and, amazingly, sent a low-level bureaucrat into the meeting with Pfizer, basically insulting Pfizer out of the room. The longer this pandemic has gone on, the less the Prime Minister has been willing to stand up and support Australians and the less this Prime Minister has been willing to insert himself into the difficult political decisions that confront people day to day.

I know that many of my friends in the Victorian government have had a very difficult year. They are deeply sorry about all of the consequences of the decisions made, but they had to front up and make these decisions because the Prime Minister of our country, during the middle of a pandemic, refused to.