David Van (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I assure Senator Marielle Smith that I'll be anything but delicate in this. What we've seen today is marketing spin at its greatest. We've seen the Labor Party's marketing plans exposed in the parliament by Senator Birmingham, after the attacks by those opposite and now this take note of answers motion. They are going to go after the Prime Minister and they are going to highlight that he has been slow and late on vaccines, climate change, bushfires and financial support for Victoria. Well, let me set the record straight on this, because we're anything but slow or late on any of these.

On 5 November last year, the Prime Minister put out an announcement that he had already ordered 135 million doses of vaccine, more than enough for five doses for every Australian. Then, last week, in my home state of Victoria, Premier Andrews said in the media that the Prime Minister forgot to order the vaccines. We know that's a lie. We know that the Premier of Victoria lied about that. On 21 February this year, the Prime Minister announced that the Australian government had 'a comprehensive plan to offer COVID-19 vaccines to all Australians by the end of October 2021'. And I think we've seen that, by the end of October—or maybe a day or two after—that was done. We hit 80 per cent vaccinated. More than 91 per cent of the eligible population over 16 are now protected. No-one said that the rollout of the vaccine had to be a straight line. Of course it was going to ramp up. We had no vaccine. There were countries that demanded and needed vaccine more than we did, and they got it. But we met our promise to the Australian people. The Prime Minister made a promise to the Australian people and we met it.

Our record on the vaccine rollout is better than the UK, better than the US and better than New Zealand. So with more vaccines going into arms every day, it's likely that we'll overtake more vaccines. The Labor Party's position on vaccines is woeful. The Labor Party has endorsed a candidate for the seat of Higgins who spent all of last year and most of this year putting out misinformation and creating vaccine hesitancy about the AstraZeneca vaccine, saying it was a population-level experiment with high stakes attached to it. Personally, I'm not comfortable with that approach at all. She also said there is a possibility that the AstraZeneca vaccine will be rolled out to 10 million adults but we still might be vulnerable when we relax our international borders. We know that's not true. Would the Labor candidate for Higgins have voted with Pauline Hanson's One Nation party yesterday? It sounds like it, from this. She has promoted vaccine hesitancy all the way through. We can see that Labor has had a really ordinary run on that.

I'm happy to talk to the financial support for Victoria. The Morrison government has provided over $4 billion to Victoria through COVID economic support. That is more per capita than any other state in the country—