Perin Davey (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is certainly clear that Labor got the memo this week about their key speaking points. With everything else going on, Labor are ensuring they keep it negative—shock, fear and loathing, 'bad vaccination rates, bad PM,' blah, blah, blah. Yesterday they were quoting the PM ad nauseam: 'He said, "It's not a race." How bad is our Prime Minister?' They've been harping on about that for quite a while now. They've also been harping on about how the Prime Minister had just two jobs, as they say. Well, I'm sure the Prime Minister would love to have only two jobs, but the reality is not so simple, as the Australian public are well aware. It is not as simple as Labor delivering their tired sound grabs, and yet they accuse the Prime Minister of being addicted to slogans.

It is true that, early on in the piece, the Prime Minister did say, 'It's not a race,' because he wanted to keep our public calm. He could have said to the Australian public: 'Don't panic. We have the vaccine. We have a plan. Stay calm.' He used different words. Did we get everything right from day one of the rollout? No, and the Prime Minister has admitted that. Did the changing ATAGI advice throw a spanner in the works of the best-laid plans? Absolutely. But we are not the only country that had to pivot and deal with changing advice regarding different vaccines. I'm not quite sure what Labor are proposing when they harp on about the fact that we didn't have enough vaccinations early enough. We were also a country with one of the lowest rates of infection in the world. Did they want us, as a wealthy Western nation, to push other countries aside and say, 'Give us your vaccine?' Atrocious.

But, while the public were told, 'It's not a race,' that doesn't mean our agencies, our healthcare workers, the vaccination hubs and others have not been racing. Indeed, it is now clear that, from a slow start, they're racing like Phar Lap. Per capita, as Senator Hollie Hughes said earlier, people in New South Wales are now getting vaccinated faster than at the peak of vaccinations in the US and the UK. Dr Nick Coatsworth tweeted on the weekend:

UK was the world model in vaccination and NSW is now exceeding it.

And we're rolling out our ancillary troops. GP clinics across the country have now administered over nine million doses. Community pharmacies are delivering AstraZeneca. The Royal Flying Doctor Service—if I may respond to Senator Lines's worry about remote communities and Indigenous communities—have delivered 22,000 jabs into the arms of our most remote communities, through 90 site visits, as well as delivering nearly 14,000 additional doses to remote health services. Even our Defence Force is engaged. In my state, the ADF delivered 1,500 vaccines at a pop-up clinic in Dubbo just last Saturday—one day. We are now delivering well over a million doses a week. In fact, the most recent data shows it took just three days to deliver the last million doses, so we are off and racing. But we don't want to panic the nation.

While this motion is right, in that we didn't meet the six million target by the end of May, we are now getting almost that figure out per month, and, at current rates, we are on track to have 80 per cent of the over-16 population vaccinated by the end of November. But it requires a level of personal responsibility. People need to come forward. So I say to Labor: stop fearmongering, stop looking in the rear-view mirror, stop harping on about past targets missed and look at what we are achieving. Look to the horizons. I say to the 30 per cent of eligible people who are now fully vaccinated: thank you. And I say to those coming to get vaccinated: thank you. We're moving forward.