Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In those five minutes of ranting from the other side, thankfully—help me out here; five times 200, that's 1,000—a thousand extra people went and got vaccinated, just in the last five minutes. That's despite the efforts of those on the other side, who just want to run down the program that is seeing Australians getting protected from the coronavirus. Thank goodness that Australians are stepping up and doing that, in spite of the rubbish that comes from those opposite. It's absolutely outrageous.

Frankly, after spending these three weeks or so here in Canberra, I just can't wait to get home. I can't wait to get home, back to Western Australia, because it is the best place in the world to live and you really wouldn't want to be anywhere else. It's absolutely fantastic. And the way that Western Australians have stepped up to deal with the coronavirus pandemic is phenomenal. But let's just deal with some facts and the reality here. The last delta case that came across the border into Western Australia occurred when a woman came from Bondi over to Perth—she worked as a physio or something like that in a gym—and it spread to just a couple of people that she was in close contact with, and those people isolated. Those people appropriately isolated and they tested positive. Cases emerged out of those few people who were in isolation due to being in those COVID hotspots. It was at that point, 48 hours after the index case was known, that the state government, appropriately, locked down the state because we just didn't know how far it had spread across Perth and the metropolitan area. But, as it turned out, there was no further transmission—no transmission apart from those who were in those initial close-contact areas. Thank goodness for that, because it meant that we didn't have to have an enduring lockdown, like we're seeing here in the ACT and, certainly, what they're seeing in New South Wales.

Contrast that with what's happened here in the ACT. The Chief Minister immediately locked it down. We all recall the press conference that was held at about 12.15 in the afternoon. By 5 pm that day, it was already locked down. That was about two days earlier than the Premier of Western Australia locked down Western Australia when the last outbreak occurred. So this notion that the Chief Minister crushed and killed the virus is an absolute outrage. What you're seeing here in the ACT is a situation where the virus is spreading, but there's a huge amount of compliance—ACT people are very compliant—and there's a huge effort being made by the authorities and by health professionals to ensure that this virus doesn't spread. Now, I drove home from here the other night—I've hired a car to be able to get to and from my apartment because I was here all last week. There are New South Wales numberplates on my hire car, and I was pulled over by the police. The police asked me, 'Where have you been and where are you going?' Obviously, I complied and told them exactly what I'd been doing. I'd been at work and I was going straight home, as per what we're allowed to do. They're taking it very seriously here—very, very seriously—but there is still an element of COVID spreading.

So for Senator Pratt to come in here and pretend there's this miraculous thing going on in WA, just because we're Western Australians—and I sympathise with that; we are very special people over there. That's very true. But it's just outrageous to think that we're somehow immune from this. Western Australia is just as prone to having an outbreak as anywhere else. We have hundreds of trucks coming across the border. The question is: are we actually ready; is our health system ready? The Deputy Premier, the health minister over there, blamed Western Australians for the rise in health issues when he said that they weren't presenting because of the COVID issues last year. It's just outrageous. We've got to make sure that we're actually ready for when there is an outbreak. The best thing that Western Australians can do is go and get themselves vaccinated. But we've got to also make sure that the health system is set up and ready, and I'm concerned about whether or not Western Australia is actually ready and the health system is ready—