Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] On 9 July this year I wrote to the Minister for Government Services, Senator Reynolds, on behalf of Tasmanian constituents who were concerned that their vaccinations had not appeared on the Australian Immunisation Register. One of these constituents is a fire safety and training consultant who does a lot of work with residential aged care. A COVID vaccine mandate was about to come into effect for residential aged care in Tasmania and he needed to prove his vaccination status quickly. It took until 14 September for the minister to reply to my letter. Minister Reynolds revealed that a software constraint meant immunisation data failed to transfer from the Tasmanian Department of Health to the register. Instead of alerting the public, the minister quietly deployed Services Australia staff to help Tas health catch up and manually input 3,788 vaccinations.

I wrote to Minister Reynolds again with a series of questions about the vaccine certificate bungle—in fact, I have written to the minister three times on this issue—but she refused to answer any more of my questions. This is outrageous and it stinks of a cover-up. Australians have a right to know what happened. Without answers, how can they know that the issue has been fully resolved and that their vaccination status will appear on the register in a timely manner? Vaccinations are our ticket to freedom but only if Australians can demonstrate they've been vaccinated.

The latest bungle comes from the government that gave us robodebt, the botched COVIDSafe app and the most shambolic census in history. How can Australians trust any ICT project this government gets its hands on, including the Immunisation Register? It's time for the minister to come clean, tell us what happened, tell us why it happened and make sure that all those people have their names properly on the register.