Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Senator Wong's motion. Vaccines and vaccinations save lives. They are one of the most powerful tools in our public health toolkit to fight this virus and to protect our community, and we as community leaders should be encouraging people to get vaccinated. We should be sharing information about the opportunities to do so, and we should be focused on holding the authorities to account—governments both state and federal—for creating those opportunities and incentives for people to get vaccinated. The story of Australia's COVID times is a story dominated by the success of the community in coming together to act in community-minded ways to limit death and harm, juxtaposed against the failure of the Morrison government. It is now conclusively known that our government—the Liberals—had the opportunity to order more vaccines earlier, and they didn't.

The three key elements of a successful vaccine rollout, whether it be for COVID-19 or for any other disease, are communication, coordination and supply. In each of these areas, the national government is the most important actor. They have the most levers to pull, to get the work done, yet the Liberal government failed. They failed disabled people—particularly, actively deprioritising us when the extent of their mismanagement became known. They have failed time and time again to take the simple steps being modelled all around the world to get vaccines to people proactively and get them that protection.

What we saw last week was a continuation of the Liberal failure in this space. Not content with failing to get the vaccines when we needed them, not content with taking away the supports that people needed to follow the health advice and keep the case numbers down, the Morrison government last week failed its final test: the test of moral character, the test of how you respond when terrifying violence begins to spread in your community, when lies and deceit are spread by those in positions of power. The Prime Minister was given the opportunity to condemn the violent, hateful rhetoric, to call it out, and he failed to do it. He gave it safe harbour for the simple reason that he sees votes in it. He sees that—