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

Hemingway wrote that bankruptcy happens gradually and then suddenly. The consequences of the Prime Minister's decision that vaccination was not a race have revealed themselves in much the same way. The Prime Minister's plan with COVID, as with everything it seems, appears always to have been to do as little as possible, take as little responsibility as possible and then just hope that everything would work out in the end. Frequent small outbreaks were built into the government's plan. They were a natural consequence of Mr Morrison's refusal to take responsibility and fix the hotel quarantine system. His own budget documents from May this year assumed there would be one lockdown a month. But there was always a risk that these outbreaks could not be contained, especially with the government's failure to acquire enough vaccines to meet any of the numerous vaccination time lines it devised and then discarded over the last 12 months.

The Prime Minister was gambling with other people's lives and with other people's livelihoods, and it's individuals and families across New South Wales and the country who are paying the price. As the case numbers in New South Wales have climbed gradually and then suddenly—just as Hemingway told us might happen—the consequences have become stark. Back in June, the Prime Minister congratulated Premier Berejiklian for not going into a full lockdown, and here we are in August with the third day in a row of case numbers over 800 in New South Wales. These numbers are the highest that we have seen since the pandemic began, yet the government was unable to tell us in question time today when it expects they will peak. A good government would be honest with the Australian public about where we are and where we are heading. It would own up to its mistakes. It would lay out the sacrifices it is asking the Australian public to accept and it would explain what the plan out of here really is. Well, it seems that is too difficult a task for this Prime Minister, who always wanted the job but never wanted the work.

The reporting over the weekend that the Doherty modelling was based on low case loads and may not support opening up at 70 per cent was, sadly, not news. The Prime Minister's approach has always been to assume good luck and low case loads. The Prime Minister's plan has always been just to hope that everything goes right. We heard from the Doherty institute's Professor James McCaw that, if New South Wales case numbers weren't reduced, we'd need:

… stronger social measures and stronger versions of lockdowns rather than weaker.

We've heard from epidemiologist Professor Blakely: 'If you've got high numbers, your contact tracing will be overwhelmed and you won't have as much of an effect from your vaccination coverage to keep things under control.'

I read the Doherty advice—I wonder sometimes whether Senator Colbeck has. It's very clear that all of those thresholds are absolutely dependent on having an effective contact, trace and isolate strategy sitting behind them. Meanwhile, that's of no interest to the Prime Minister apparently. He was on Insiders, insisting that New South Wales should open up at 70 per cent as per the Doherty modelling. There was no nuance, no reflection on the gravity of the situation, no reflection on the risks he is asking Australians to take on, just stubborn pride and ego. It's characteristic of his entire approach to leadership.

This weekend more than 200 children aged nine and under were diagnosed with COVID-19 in New South Wales. That's chilling news for parents who look at their precious little people; they worry whether the months of home schooling may not, in fact, be the worst thing that their kids have to face. And what makes that particularly confronting is that the overwhelming majority of children are not eligible for vaccines. Will children be amongst the 70 per cent vaccinated? Well, we don't know. The Australian public actually deserves some answers from this gutless Prime Minister. (Time expired)