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

[by video link] What we just saw was more apologies from the National Party for the utter failures of this Prime Minister. In regional New South Wales, the vaccine rollout, despite what the Prime Minister says, lags well behind the cities. And you know what? The Australian rollout lags well behind the rest of the developed world. Do you know what would fix border closures and lockdowns? A proper vaccine rollout would fix them. We have a Prime Minister who has utterly failed Australians, with a botched vaccine rollout and a failed national quarantine system. The government has been undermining the states at every turn, including by again threatening today to take the Western Australian government to court, right in this moment of national crisis, when day after day we are getting a thousand new infections in New South Wales, all at the feet of this Prime Minister's failure.

What the country needed was a John Curtin, a Bob Hawke or even, I dare say, a John Howard. But instead what we've got is a poor man's Billy McMahon. This Prime Minister is more Billy McMahon than even Billy McMahon himself was. He is more marketing than man. He is fundamentally not up to the great national task that confronts this parliament: vaccinating Australia, keeping Australians safe and actually delivering on the national interest, a concept that this Prime Minister is fundamentally incapable of understanding. His complacency, his vanity, his refusal to take responsibility and his complete incapacity to distinguish between the national interest and his own narrow political interest have let Australia and Australians down, and the sooner he is in the rear-vision mirror the better.