Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Some 14.5 million Australians have not yet received any COVID-19 vaccination—not Pfizer, not AstraZeneca. Three in four Australians are not yet fully vaccinated. The Prime Minister massively bungled the vaccine procurement, and his government is now engaged in a mad scramble to increase and accelerate vaccine shipments from overseas. He will eventually achieve satisfactory levels of vaccination, but it will be many months later than it should have been, and there will have been great social and economic cost associated with the delay.

What is particularly worrying is the extent to which the Prime Minister's so-called plan for reopening Australia is being wrapped and accelerated by his political objectives. The declared target of full vaccination of 80 per cent of the eligible adult population excludes one in five adults—that's 4.6 million adults—and all children below the age of 16, or 4.8 million kids. At the 80 per cent level, millions of Australians, including children and teenagers, will not be fully vaccinated and will still be vulnerable to the virus and its potential, long-term, debilitating effects. There's much argument about the Doherty institute modelling. However, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Prime Minister is wilfully disregarding the scale of the New South Wales delta strain outbreak and the spread of the virus amongst children. These factors surely deserve much deeper investigation—more than just one institute—and that analysis should be made public. It's a case of a looming election skewing the Prime Minister's view. Australians are right to question his judgement in relation to— (Time expired)