Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President. I'll withdraw that. That will also save the Senate from hearing a substantial part of the character assessment of the Prime Minister that the article provided. I will go to the end of the article:

Among Berejiklian's inner circle, it's considered a joke to call Morrison "the Prime Minister for NSW". They consider Morrison to be the Prime Minister for Morrison and no one else.

That's what the Prime Minister's friends think of him. It's not simply a personal assessment of one leader over another. It has real costs for Australian families.

The article then goes on to chronicle the New South Wales Treasurer's efforts to establish an effective new JobKeeper scheme in New South Wales. It says that Mr Perrottet was so determined to fix Mr Morrison's failed economic response that he began to establish his own scheme. The article says of the Prime Minister:

… Morrison refused to supply the essential information even though the program would not cost Canberra a cent.

The Herald goes on to say:

The politics seemed pretty plain – Morrison didn't want to be seen to be abandoning the states. The two governments reverted to a fall-back plan, sharing the cost of increased supplementary payments instead. This confirmed the suspicion in the Berejiklian government that Morrison was more interested in the politics of appearance than the substance of outcomes.

Has there ever been a more brutal summary of a political career than that? Mr Morrison was more interested in the politics of appearance than in the substance of outcomes.

For three years the people of Australia have watched this unlikely Prime Minister. They've seen the announcements, the press conferences, the Facebook lives, the hectoring, the lists, the mansplaining, the slogans, the made-for-television marketing, the phoney ironed hi-vis jackets, the leaks, the negative briefings, the diversions, the gaslighting and the spin. And Australians have stopped listening. They've started to tune out from the bullying, the flip-flopping, the shifting goalposts, the mini-Trump efforts to create his own reality, the efforts to keep the story moving along. Marketing, spin and slick political messaging works—right up until the moment it stops working. And when it stops working, gravity takes over, and that's the problem for this Prime Minister.

The reality is that there are over 1,000 daily infections in New South Wales, when we should be vaccinated, healthy and free. The reality is that Prime Minister Scott Morrison sat on his hands on vaccines, when it was his job to order them. He hasn't turned a sod or laid a brick for effective national quarantine and continues to undermine the health efforts of the states. The reality is that this Prime Minister has broken every promise he has made to the Australian people: that they would be first in the queue for vaccines, that stranded Aussies overseas would be home by Christmas, that four million vaccinations would be delivered to Australians by the end of March, that vaccination wasn't a race, that all aged-care residents and workers would be vaccinated by Easter 2021, that six million people would be fully vaccinated in May and four million by April, and now, confusingly, that apparently all Australians will be vaccinated by October.

The reality is that millions of Australians are waiting for their vaccines—in the bush, in Western Sydney and among aged-care residents and workers, disability workers, NDIS recipients, schoolteachers, Indigenous Australians, children, supermarket workers and truckies. The reality is that millions of us are locked down with no end in sight because of this Prime Minister. The consequences of lockdowns and the public health measures that his own backbench complain about—unemployment, the mental health impacts, the impacts on kids, lost opportunities, the dragging back of economic growth—are entirely a function of the failure of this Prime Minister's leadership and his incapacity to do his job on behalf of the Australian people.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is preparing for his 'mission accomplished' moment. Yesterday he said our vaccine challenges had been overcome. He must be living in a different universe to the rest of us. Mr Morrison received his vaccine early this year, but millions of Australians are still waiting for theirs, because of his failure on vaccine delivery. He thinks his best chance of re-election is to try to pretend everything is somebody else's problem, everything is somebody else's fault. I saw today the efforts to blame the people of Wilcannia themselves for the low levels of vaccination in that township. And he wants to suggest that it will all be over very soon. But it won't. Gladys Berejiklian, the New South Wales premier, knows it; Mr Perrottet, the New South Wales treasurer, knows it; and the Australian people know it. They know who he is—more marketing than man, more Billy McMahon than even Billy McMahon was.

The Prime Minister for New South Wales? The New South Wales Liberals know that's not true; he is the Prime Minister for nobody but himself. He is interested only in his own political interests, not in the interests of the Australian people. The New South Wales Liberals themselves know that the only good way to look at this Prime Minister is through the rear-vision mirror.