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

If you want to know why the New South Wales Liberals ran such a classist political lockdown, just look at some of the people who were calling the shots in their government, people like former New South Wales minister Pru Goward, who sneeringly wrote last week of the underclass of our region 'They are damaged, lacking in trust and discipline, and highly self-interested,' The gold-standard of contempt, propped up by the Financial Review, showing what the Liberals really think of Western Sydney. I am proud of the spirit and the grit of our people, who are brimming with the stuff that this mob say they admire—aspiration. If one creed defines our region it is this: being there for your mates when the times are tough.

Guess what. The New South Wales Liberals and these Liberals here were never around when we needed them most. We wanted a strong public health response with vaccines boosted into the regions. Instead, we got a divided city, police helicopters over our roofs and the federal Liberals sending in the troops. When I asked the Prime Minister if he would send in the ADF to help set up and run vaccination clinics in Mount Druitt, he turned his back on us, flicked the answer to the health minister, the queue fronter, who told us we were at the front of the queue for vaccines but didn't know how to distribute them to us. Sixty per cent of the deaths during the lockdown were in western and south-western Sydney. Many were preventable, so I wonder whether the minister is going to call a royal commission into that great failure of public administration that was the national vaccine rollout.