Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

This government takes Western Australians for mugs. That's the approach this government has taken when it comes to negotiating with the state government about quarantine facilities. We had been promised a new quarantine facility at Jandakot Airport. That's what the Prime Minister promised. And yet, about a week later, that facility has now moved to near the RAAF air base.

In Minister Birmingham's response today, he tried to imply that the state government had somehow insisted on the announcement. Well, I can assure you and I can assume that of course Premier Mark McGowan is going to go, 'If you want Western Australia to sign up to some kind of pathway out of our lockdowns then this Commonwealth government has to take responsibility for quarantine and it has to make public that responsibility.' I'm damn sure that that's what happened. Mark McGowan said, 'Yes, you've got to get out and announce this; otherwise, there's no way that we're going to sign up to your pathway out of lockdowns.'

So what happens is that the government has to rush out and announce this because it hasn't yet done a proper assessment. It hasn't actually done the work yet. All this demonstrates is that this government is extremely late to the party when it comes to taking responsibility for quarantine. These facilities are not even going to be finished until March next year. When you hear these announcements, they say: 'We're still designing them. We're still looking at how they're going to be laid out and what's going to happen.'

All that demonstrates is that this government has done two-fifths of whatever to get this underway before Mark McGowan said, 'Come on, I've been asking you about this for months and months.' Last April Mark McGowan asked, 'When are you going to take your quarantine facility responsibilities seriously?' Last year Mark McGowan was asking, 'Why isn't the Commonwealth taking responsibility for quarantine?' It's only now that the Prime Minister wants to be the champion of freedom and cover up for his mistakes in New South Wales. Of course all Western Australians—and all Australians—want to be free. They want to be out from under lockdowns. But we have had a sure and true path to freedom in Western Australia, which has been to act quickly when we've needed to with short, sharp lockdowns—the kinds of lockdowns that New South Wales required and didn't deliver. It didn't deliver at all in terms of a pathway out of COVID.

So here we are at this point in the pandemic, 18 months after it started, and only now does the Commonwealth government come out and say, 'Oh yeah, we'll build some quarantine facilities for you in Western Australia.' It doesn't seem like the government wants to build any for Queensland. This is all about the negotiations that have happened in national cabinet, I'm quite sure. It's all about how Mark McGowan said, 'Come on, you've got to live up to your quarantine responsibilities, and we're not going to sign up until you make good on taking up your responsibilities.' It's not because this government took proactive responsibility. It's not because this government said, 'We really understand that for Australia to open up'—as the Prime Minister has said he wants it to—'we have to have purpose-built quarantine facilities.' We absolutely have to, yet it appears we're not going to get them until March next year.

These are not complicated facilities. They're not all that difficult to build. The difficulty comes in with staffing them and running them and doing all of that properly. These are not all that difficult to build. This government has finally said, 'Yes, we'll build quarantine facilities,' but they're not even going to be ready until March next year, because they're still being planned and designed. It's very clear that this government has done nothing until this point in time. (Time expired)