Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Senator Watt, for the question. Clearly, the Australian government is responsible for the vaccination rollout to Australians all across the country. So, in that context, we are responsible for the management of the vaccination rollout for everybody. We as a government have taken particular responsibility and we indicated publicly that we would organise the vaccination specifically of residents and workers in residential aged care. We made that announcement very early in the vaccine rollout.

Unfortunately, we received a couple of pieces of advice that meant that we had to reassess our vaccine rollout process. Firstly—and I've indicated this to the Senate in Senate estimates, as Senator Watt very well knows—we received advice that we should not vaccinate residents and the workforce at the same time as it wouldn't be safe to do so. So we followed that advice, and we continued with our process of vaccinating the residents in aged care, and I'm very pleased to say that that 100 per cent of aged-care facilities across this country have received a first-dose visit and 94.2 per cent of those facilities have now received a second-dose visit. So we are very close to having vaccinated our aged-care residents.

Then we received some advice that indicated that we should change the way that we utilise the AstraZeneca vaccine. So that meant that we had to again re-pivot the rollout for vaccines to the workforce. So we went back to national cabinet and we got agreement from the states and the territories that they would work with us to vaccinate the workforce. So we are working with them. We are offering five different mechanisms to vaccinate the workforce across the country.