Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Greens motion and note the contribution from the previous speakers. I don't think there's any greater issue that this country faces at the moment than confronting the coronavirus and the response to the pandemic that we now find ourselves in. It's almost as if we're living in a parallel universe: on the one hand, we're in here discussing other bits of legislation which may or may not be of interest to the community, and, on the other hand, the Greens and Labor maintain that the most important issue that this country now faces is dealing with the issue of pandemic leave.

We have seen the response of the government to the aged-care crisis that's currently going on in Victorian aged-care homes and in Victorian hospitals. What was one of the triggers for that development in Victoria? One of the triggers was that employees were going from aged-care facility to aged-care facility. Why did they do that? Well, the people in this industry tend to be relatively low paid. In order to maintain an income, because of the casual nature of the employment, they have continued to work, in circumstances where obviously what they should have been doing was staying at home and recovering from this terrible virus. But instead, in order to feed their families, to pay their bills, they have been going to work.

Of all the issues that we could confront here this week and over this two-week period, I don't think there's a more important issue than the ones that the Greens have put on the table today. We—