Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services (Senator Colbeck) to questions without notice asked by Senators Kitching and Gallagher today relating to COVID-19 vaccinations.

Mr Morrison promised that four million Australians would be vaccinated by the end of March. He has failed that test. Now it's the start of May, and we are only at 2.8 million. In fact the Prime Minister has failed pretty much every vaccine test that he has set himself. He promised that all of group 1a would be vaccinated by Easter. He failed that test. He promised that six million Australians would be vaccinated by 10 May. Monday has come and gone, and we're at 2.8 million. The Prime Minister has previously promised that all Australians will be vaccinated by the end of October. That seems impossible now, doesn't it? At the current rate of vaccination of 400,000 a week, we will not get there until 2023.

Weirdly, that's not what it says in the budget papers, is it? The budget papers assume that all Australians will be fully vaccinated this year. The Prime Minister is now backing away from that at a rate of knots. Yesterday he was trying very hard to distinguish, in his media appearance, between a policy setting and an assumption. That is a distinction that won't make sense to many Australians, and Senator Colbeck's answers today certainly did not make that any clearer. He spent a considerable amount of time today trying to distinguish between policy positions and assumptions and the grey zone of semantics between those ideas. But Australians actually don't need another word salad from this appalling minister, who oversaw a shambles of a response to the threat of COVID to aged-care residents. They actually just want a simple answer to a simple question: when will all of Australia be vaccinated?

It's not a moot question. It's not an unimportant question. The reason that the budget includes information—assumptions—about vaccination is that it has a real impact on Australia's ability to recover economically from the effects of the pandemic. A vaccinated Australia is less vulnerable to the risk posed when a positive case escapes from hotel quarantine. A vaccinated Australia won't have to have a widespread lockdown if community transmission is detected. A vaccinated Australian can travel, supporting vulnerable jobs in Cairns and in Launceston. That is the reality for many countries, and the Prime Minister promised us last year that we would be first in line and front of the queue for vaccines. According to analysis by the Financial Times, we're actually ranked 104th internationally in the rollout, and economists are telling us that all this delay caused by this incompetence will cost the Australian economy billions of dollars.

This is something that the Prime Minister should have and could have taken charge of personally. The Morrison government has badly mishandled sourcing vaccines, and today's announcement about sourcing Moderna vaccines is honestly long overdue. Labor has been calling for months now for the Australian government to strike a deal with Moderna for access to their state-of-the-art mRNA vaccine. That's a position that the government has consistently rejected as recently as the last few weeks. At the heart of this is the failure by Mr Morrison to take responsibility. He loves the job. He clearly loves the job. But he doesn't really like doing the work. He would rather lean on the state premiers. He wants a photo taken with them when things go right. He's nowhere to be seen when things go wrong. Just like in the bushfires, he's nowhere to be seen and unwilling to take responsibility for the things that really matter to this country, but he's always willing to point the finger, always finding someone else who is responsible for the things that have gone wrong, and he's never willing to stand up and actually take responsibility for the things that will make a difference in the lives of ordinary Australians.

The government should stop pretending that the vaccine rollout is going well. They should stop blaming other people who draw attention to the failures. They should face up to the problems they have created, because Australians and the economy are paying the price.