Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak as a senator for the great state of New South Wales, after six weeks in lockdown, and I want to put on the record some of the challenges that are facing businesses who desperately need assistance. Today I received correspondence from a company that describes itself as a 63-year-old commercial construction business headquartered in Albury, with additional offices in Orange and Ulladulla. It's a very significant employer. They talk about the construction industry and how that's been shut down. All of this goes to the government's failure to do those two critical jobs of government: to plan a proper form of quarantine that wouldn't leak on at least 28 occasions, and to provide proper vaccination. Companies like Zauner, and companies right across the Central Coast that suffered in last year's lockdown, have had a 45 per cent loss of revenue over the first two weeks of the lockdown in New South Wales. They faced a 23 per cent loss last year and 48 per cent after two months. Now they're down 45 per cent in this year alone. So the impact on business is absolutely enormous.

In Sydney right now, there are 286 people who are in hospital. We've had 17 deaths. I just want to put on record how distressing it is for me, as a mother of three 20-somethings, to think about what the family of the 27-year-old person who died in New South Wales is going through now and how entirely preventable this illness could be if there were access to the vaccines—if the government had acted.

We're discussing, in the Treasury Laws Amendment (COVID-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021, a response to the economic impact, but the economic impact is not separate from our lives. It's not separate from the illness. It's not separate from the mental health challenges. It's not separate from the identity issues that people are struggling with.

In the LGAs of Campbelltown, Blacktown, Canterbury Bankstown, Cumberland, Fairfield, Georges River, Liverpool and Parramatta, huge numbers of Australians who have ABNs, who are hardworking tradies—blue-collar workers who cannot work from home—are stuck in their homes. Many of them are facing the challenge of being unable to feed their families. They are looking to this Liberal-National government to respond to their challenges.

The government has come forward with a few different plans that carved out businesses and put some back in. They said they couldn't do anything; they couldn't help you if you didn't first spend your $10,000 in the bank. Then they waived that. There are so many changes. So many people who are from non-English-speaking backgrounds or for whom literacy is not their strong suit, but who are great workers, are struggling not only to understand the health orders and directions that keep changing but to participate in the scheme that the government has constructed. There is some money. It's coming through, but it's not working in the way that we need it to work, and not in a timely way.

I also want to quickly indicate that critical to getting the messages out in these eight LGAs in total lockdown in Sydney are the churches and the faith leaders from all of the faiths. They are out there trying to do their best to support the people in their communities. They are offering spiritual nourishment and mental health support, and they're providing physical support through charities that are associated with them. I just want people to know that, while the government have provided some financial support, at the same time they are trying to put through regulations with regard to charities. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission amendment is going to massively limit and impact all of the communities of faith who practise charitable works in our community. The government are saying, 'We want your help.' They are going to communities of faith. At the same time as they're doing that, they are actually constructing regulations that will massively limit what great Australian charities attached to so many religions are doing in the community. Again, that is an indication of what the government says and what it does, and how all the things that it says it's doing don't match up with what it actually does.

So I warn people in communities of faith to protect those communities, to stand up and to say to the government, 'We need to look after one another right now, so don't attack our faith community and don't attack the charities that we desperately need in the middle of this enormous crisis'—the COVID-19 crisis, now into 2021, that is doing such damage to families, communities and businesses right across this country but particularly to those people from New South Wales in Campbelltown, Blacktown, Canterbury Bankstown, Cumberland, Fairfield, Georges River, Liverpool and Parramatta, and, of course, on the Central Coast, in the Blue Mountains and at Shellharbour down around Wollongong, where they're so captured by the chaos of the failure of the Liberal-National Party government in New South Wales, in concert with this federal government.