Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Senator Canavan ought to hang his head in shame. He talks about division and creating division in the community. I can't think of too many people who have gone to greater effort than Senator Canavan to propagate misinformation, to undermine the public health message and to send out conspiracy theories. He, Senator Rennick and the member for Dawson—all of them out there on the coalition backbench—are undermining public health messages, making it tough for the health authorities, creating doubt in people's minds about whether the virus exists or whether the lockdown measures are appropriate, and creating doubts about vaccines. Senator Canavan ought not to come in here unless he apologises for the damage that he has done to the national interest.

The role of the National Party in this has been appalling. In March, the then Minister for Regional Health, Regional Communications and Local Government told the other place:

Regional Australia has been probably the safest place on the planet …

He went on to say:

… this rollout is about demography, not geography. So when your age group or particular group is ready to be vaccinated, the rollout in regional Australia is exactly the same as it is in the cities.

The Deputy Prime Minister told the Insiders program, when asked a few weeks ago how the rollout was going out in regional Australia, 'It's going very well.' Well, nothing could be further from the truth. This has been a story of complacency from the National Party and of undermining the public health messages.

What have we got now? Dubbo, Armidale, Tamworth, the Northern Rivers and the Hunter all in lockdown. All of these are regions with vaccination rates well below the national average. While there was a chance to vaccinate regional New South Wales, the National Party were entirely focused on themselves. The Deputy Prime Minister was too busy doing the numbers in Canberra to address the rollout failures in his own electorate, where the vaccination numbers are catastrophically low. He even replaced the minister responsible for the vaccine rollout in regional Australia, not because of his failure in standing up for regional communities and delivering vaccines but because he voted the wrong way. Then there's the Nationals member for Dawson, who's using his privileged role in this parliament to actively spread disinformation about COVID-19, without any rebuke from the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister and egged on by extremists like Senator Canavan and Senator Rennick.

Senator Canavan himself published an op-ed full of half-baked calculations which would embarrass his former employer at the Productivity Commission. He said that the public health measures were too expensive. He's since tweeted:

Yes Delta is more transmissible but it is less deadly so we don't need to lockdown. End the lockdowns!

Well, you can be sure of one thing: Senator Canavan will never have to attend a hospital bed and intubate a seriously ill patient. He will never have to clean a patient who is in a coma. He will never have to talk to the grieving relatives of a patient with COVID-19 who has died. He will continue to just propagate his keyboard warrior theories and promote disinformation and division within the Australian community, and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

The result of all of this division and all of this complacency is more lockdowns extending their reach into regional Australia, where the health outcomes have always been worse. The result of the 'no lockdown' approach of Senator Canavan would be regional hospitals overwhelmed, more deaths and more disabilities. He is a propagator of a COVID-19 death cult. He ought to stop, the member for Dawson ought to stop, Senator Rennick ought to stop and the Prime Minister should actually have the courage to stand up to them, to rebuke them publicly and to send out, for once, a clear and coherent public health message and do the job that this Prime Minister's supposed to have done: deliver vaccines for Australia. (Time expired)