Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak today in the chamber about the Morrison government's failure to deliver effective vaccine rollout and safe national quarantine, meaning that we have millions of Australians—10 million Australians—who are currently living in lockdown situations.

I think it's worth going back and having a look at what happened right from the beginning of the vaccine rollout to answer the question: why has it been such a shambles, why has there been so much confusion in the public messaging, and why has every target or commitment given by this government failed to be achieved or reached? It starts right back at the beginning of the announcements about the vaccine procurement strategy. At the beginning of November, the Prime Minister told all of Australia, 'Australia is at the front of the queue.' That is where the misinformation and the commitments given but never reached started. This was the day that the Prime Minister announced a deal for 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 40 million from Novavax, saying that Australia was at the front of the queue for the mRNA vaccines. Of course, now one of the issues with our low vaccination rate is the failure to have adequate supply of the Pfizer vaccine. We know that the claim that we were at the front of the queue was simply not true.

The Prime Minister also said:

We aren't putting all our eggs in one basket and we will continue to pursue further vaccines should our medical experts recommend them.

Again, either the experts failed to provide the government with the advice that was actually needed by this country or the Prime Minister chose to have a very reduced number of deals. When you look around at other countries, they were signing up to five, six or seven deals. The Australian government made an absolutely clear decision not to do that.

The Prime Minister then committed to having four million Australians vaccinated by the end of March. He made this commitment in January 2021. Of course, we all know now that this was never reached either. On 31 January the health minister, Greg Hunt, said, 'Australia will be fully vaccinated by October.' He stated, 'We aim to have the country, 20 million adults, vaccinated before the end of October.' We now know of course that that won't happen either. On 1 February 2021, the Prime Minister made another promise—that all Australians who wanted a vaccine would be vaccinated by October. But, just a few days later, the failure to deliver on commitments started. On 5 February, the health secretary, Professor Murphy, said, 'It's more realistic that Australia will hit the four million vaccinated mark by early April rather than mid-March. Just a few weeks after the Prime Minister had given that commitment the government were accepting that they weren't going to meet it.

On 15 February the Prime Minister set a new target of 60,000 doses for February instead of the 80,000 he promised in January. On 16 February the health minister announced that the aged-care vaccination rollout would take approximately six weeks. Remember that? It's still not done. That was on 16 February and here we are in August and we know there are still aged-care residents to be vaccinated with their second dose and we know that the aged-care workforce, the ones that are actually bringing the virus into aged-care residential settings, haven't been vaccinated. We learnt just a couple of weeks ago that nobody actually knows what's happening with the home-care workforce because there isn't a plan. A decision was taken to not really pursue the home-care workforce because the government were too wound up with how they were failing to meet the residential aged-care vaccination target.

On 28 February this year, on the government's target of 60,000 doses by the end of February, we found out that only about half of those had been administered. So right from the get-go every target set by this government has failed. Then on 11 March, just a month after the Prime Minister said, 'Everyone who wants to be vaccinated will be fully vaccinated by October,' Professor Murphy belled the cat and said, 'We don't know whether we will be able to achieve two shots by the end of October.' On 31 March, the day that we were meant to hit the target of four million vaccinations, the Prime Minister failed to meet the target he set himself by 3.4 million vaccinations. Where he promised four million, he delivered 600,000. A week later—what a surprise!—there was a rollout recalibration. The Prime Minister announced that, after ATAGI advice, Pfizer would now be the preferred vaccine for under-50s and—what a surprise!—there wasn't enough. We had a shortage of supply because we failed to secure a deal with Pfizer that allowed for this sort of redundancy.

On 11 April the commitment to have all aged-care residents and workers and disability care residents fully vaccinated by Easter failed. That went. A few months later, we found out that a decision had been taken to take disability residents out of that target because the government were prioritising aged-care residents. They didn't meet that target anyway. Nobody told people working in the disability sector or people living with a disability themselves that that decision had been taken.

On 12 April the Prime Minister released a video statement where he announced that Australia no longer had vaccination targets. What a surprise that was considering the targets the government had set themselves had been missed! We got promised 13 pop-up vaccine clinics in New South Wales that would be open by the end of May to get aged care and disability care services done. But by July just three were listed on the Department of Health website.

The vaccination target of six million vaccinated by May was failed. Then, on 11 May, the Treasurer stated in his budget speech, 'Every Australian who would like to get two shots of the vaccine will be able to do so by the end of the year.' We know that didn't last a day before the Prime Minister overruled the Treasurer and made it clear that it's actually not government policy any longer to have a commitment that Australians will have access to two doses by the end of the year. Now the target had moved to, 'Well, we'll just hope that you'll have one dose or you'll be offered a vaccine by October.' The Prime Minister said, 'These aren't our assumptions any longer; they are not the policy settings.' On 28 May, Australia reached 3.9 million vaccinations, two months behind the original schedule, which predicted four million doses by the end of March. As to the 13 pop-up clinics that were promised, at the end of May there were still only three of them.

In June, the aged-care minister acknowledged that he didn't know how many people in the aged-care workforce had been vaccinated. Health officials said only 10 per cent of the workforce had been reached through in-house vaccination programs and at least 20 aged-care facilities were to be visited as part of the aged-care residents vaccination rollout. This was in June. The vaccination rollout started in February, and aged-care residents, disability residents and the workers in those areas were 1a. They were meant to be done in the first six weeks.

On 19 June we got a new term, 'horizons'. That was to replace the word 'targets', we think. We haven't had an ad campaign. We've had strategies, we've had plans, we've had horizons, we've had targets and now we've got a campaign plan being launched. It seems every time something goes wrong with the vaccine rollout another document comes out. There are more phases—1a, 1b, 2a and 2b, which are now phases A, B and C. And now we have the Doherty modelling announcing different arrangements that are being put in place. Is it any wonder people are confused about what's going on? There hasn't been an ad campaign to target people around the vaccination, because we haven't had enough supply, because we didn't have enough deals. Decisions taken last year have turned out to fail the Australian people in terms of getting an efficient rollout, getting it done properly and making sure we're protecting vulnerable people. None of that, which should have guided the strategy, has actually been achieved today, some six months after the rollout started.