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

I rise to speak today on a matter of great public importance, which you have just outlined in your opening statement. That is that there is, in fact, a growing list of people and institutes that Mr Morrison blames for his own failures. How on earth can we expect the leader of the nation to correct his mistakes if he can't even own them? We've seen Mr Morrison blame ATAGI, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, state and territory governments, vaccination clinics and even Australians themselves for what can only be described as a massively bungled COVID-19 vaccine rollout and his own ministers for the government's misuse of taxpayer funds in its response to that national crisis.

The consequences of Mr Morrison's failures in this area have had a massive impact on my home state of New South Wales. More than half the population woke up this morning under lockdown. For most in New South Wales, it will now be their seventh week in lockdown and the numbers of cases are rising ever higher. I want to acknowledge the incredible efforts of the Victorians under the leadership of Mr Andrews, who was absolutely maligned by the Prime Minister at the time, in preventing the spread of illness and disease in the great state of Victoria. We are in a terrible position in New South Wales now, and sadly the numbers are increasing.

This could have been avoided. All over the developed world, nations with successful vaccine rollouts are returning to life—a very, very different scenario from what we face here in Australia under the leadership of the Liberal-National party, Mr Morrison and his team. His team come in here and continue to back him up, back up his excuses and back up his contrasting reality speeches. Everything the man says is incoherent most of the time. The problem with vaccine rollouts being unable to happen is we can see a very different life for us here in Australia by comparison to overseas. We can see others across the world seeing concerts; their pubs are open and their economies are bouncing back. Why not in Australia? Why aren't we returning to normal life? Australia is not returning to the normal life that we all want, because Mr Morrison did not build a functioning quarantine system for overseas travel and he didn't secure a varied and sufficient supply of vaccine. It is as simple as that.

Has the Prime Minister taken any responsibility for his decision-making and his failure of leadership for the Australian people? Of course not, because Mr Morrison continues to pretend that he is right every time he steps up to a microphone. That is why we are finding over time he is completely contradicting himself. First, Mr Morrison did not secure enough supply of Pfizer and Moderna because he put all the eggs in the AstraZeneca basket. It is important to note that that was the cheapest version of any sort of protection that we could get. Mr Morrison and Hunt botched the messaging regarding the extremely rare blood clot condition with AstraZeneca. That led to many people who actually still believed the Prime Minister at that stage making a decision to wait for Pfizer. 'Be careful about AstraZeneca'—that was the message coming out of the leadership of this country, and people decided that they would wait for Pfizer.

Well, what a disaster waiting has been. What's happened? We've seen thousands of vials of perfectly good vaccine perish. Again, it's been a failure of leadership by Mr Morrison. I want to be very clear to anybody who might be listening to this: AstraZeneca can protect you from the virus. I have received it, my husband has received it and, despite the fact that all my children are in their 20s, I encouraged them to do their own research and each one of them has received their first jab of AstraZeneca. That's because they know that they can't rely on this government that botches everything at every turn to protect them. They had to take matters into their own hands.