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

Millions of Australians across the country are now in a COVID lockdown because the Prime Minister has bungled the two most important jobs this year—rolling out the vaccine and fixing the nation's quarantine system. Let's be very clear about what is happening. Lockdowns are still happening because the Prime Minister didn't treat the rollout as a race; it was always a race. The rollout remains the most important job the government has and they need to use every option that they have to speed it up because it is not going well. In the rollout race, Australia is coming 84th in the world. As Malcolm Turnbull recently pointed out, 'It is a colossal failure.' He went on to say it is 'the biggest failure of public administration' that he can recall. It costs a lot, an estimated $300 million a day. The economy is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars a day and billions each week because Mr Morrison has not done his job, and it's a price being paid by Australian workers and by Australian small businesses for his incompetence.

I remember really well how difficult things were for Chinese Australian businesses, particularly the restaurants, at the beginning of the pandemic. At that time, I spoke with Chinese Australian representatives in Burwood and in Hurstville about the challenges that they were facing at a time of real uncertainty and fear but also of rising racism—let's be honest. I've kept track of how these communities and these businesses are going, and there was a story the other day about the restaurateur Vivien Chen, who runs Yang's Dumpling Restaurant in Burwood. She talked in the story about just how devastating it is to be back in lockdown in 2021. She pulled her business through the challenges in 2020, but this time it's really tough. The story quoted her:

"This lockdown is proving very, very hard for us," said Ms Chen … "Our business is more than 75 per cent down compared to this time last year, and it's really bad now; there are virtually no customers.

"Yesterday, I made $200, which isn't even enough to cover my employee costs. And I really want to keep my staff because, if they go, I won't have staff anymore when this lockdown finished."

She said that many of her friends had already closed their businesses. They struggled during the previous lockdown, and this one is proving to be the last straw. She said that they couldn't manage with the opening and then closing, opening and then closing, so they've given up and closed permanently. It's these small businesses and the workers that they employ that are bearing the brunt of these lockdowns, and we owe it to them to fix up the rollout and fix up the quarantine.

Of course, it's possible to quantify the economic impact with a number, but we don't live in an economy; we live in a society, and, although it's more difficult to quantify the impact of the lockdown on the bonds between us, it doesn't make that impact any less real. In Sydney it seems likely that children will go for months without having a lesson in a classroom or being able to play with their friends. People won't be able to meet their newborn nieces and nephews, and older Australians are increasingly isolated without contact with their loved ones. And we've lost the ability to do simple things like have a conversation with our neighbours. Our communities really are the sum of these genuine, sometimes casual, human interactions, and technologies like Zoom and Skype really don't substitute for them.

None of this is an argument against lockdowns. Public health officials are rightly telling us that short and sharp lockdowns are amongst the best tools that we have right now to avoid a devastating spread of the Delta variant. But all of this is an argument for having fought tooth and nail previously, back when we had the space and the time, to put in place the conditions that would have allowed us to avoid this. Every dollar that the Prime Minister saved by not ordering more, and a more diverse range of, vaccines back in 2020 is looking very expensive indeed. And every excuse that he provided for his refusal to establish a national quarantine facility looks very foolish indeed.

Has there been any real reckoning with any of this, any sincere examination of performance? Not really. There is a continuing insistence that everything is going quite well. There has been little regret, much less sincere apology. Indeed there has been deflection, blame shifting, to the point where it's surely getting a little embarrassing for the Prime Minister's own team. It's always someone else's fault—headline after headline, press conference after press conference. It's not his fault. It's ATAGI. It's the Italians. It's the aged-care workers who didn't get themselves organised. It's somebody else's fault, but it's never his.

This week, in a new low, the coalition is, bizarrely, trying to assert that it's the opposition's fault. This is fanciful and just a little desperate, right? Labor has always supported the health advice 100 per cent. We support it about lockdowns. We support it about Pfizer. We support it about AstraZeneca. Any suggestion to the contrary is total nonsense. And, unlike the Prime Minister, we have never sought to undermine the health advice, never attacked ATAGI and never sought to influence their advice through waging some sort of public campaign.

My leader, Mr Albanese, and our entire federal Labor team have supported the science and supported the evidence around the pandemic. That is a position that really can be distinguished from the behaviour of the Prime Minister and the people around him, especially that group of backbenchers who have sought to gain political advantage by microtargeting messages to the antilockdown crowd and the antivaccine crowd.

This, oddly enough, is a government that seems determined to behave like an opposition. It really is quite that strange. They would rather point the finger and complain about external circumstances than actually take responsibility for delivering and for leading, because what you need, what we need, right now as a community is actual leadership. We need real leaders willing to step up and accept the heavy burden of leadership at a really difficult time. We need leaders to take decisions in the national interest. Australia is facing the biggest health crisis in a century, and if Mr Morrison and his team do not want the job of governing under those circumstances they really should get out of the way.

Labor does have a plan to beat COVID-19, to support our community through this pandemic, and it starts with treating the rollout like a race. We would bring the necessary urgency to this task if we were governing. We would work to increase supply by talking closely with the vaccine companies and with our allies. We would vaccinate frontline workers by bringing the vaccine to them rather than putting the burden on them to organise their own arrangements. We certainly wouldn't blame them, like the Morrison government has. And we would build the capability to start manufacturing vaccines here. We recognise what is required to lead, and we recognise the imperative for leadership at this time. The Morrison government's failures have left millions of people in very, very difficult circumstances, and it is time that instead of deflecting blame and saying that it is someone else's fault that they stood up and took responsibility for leading at this most difficult time. Thank you.