Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) Share this | Hansard source

I don't accept the premise of Senator Keneally's question. As I indicated to the chamber yesterday, we have acknowledged that there were some issues with supplies out of the national stockpile. That's one of the things that we've been working on. Coles, Woolworths and a whole range of organisations indicated that they had supply-chain issues because they had workforce out of their logistics chains, and that impacted on their capacity to deliver.

I'm advised that, in respect of this particular facility, the size and scale of the delivery—and this happened with a number of facilities—meant that the deliveries were split into a number of different packages, a number of different deliveries. So things would have arrived at different times because of those issues we had with the logistics chain. The government has acknowledged that we've had issues with deliveries out of the national stockpile. That's what we have spent all of January working on to fix, because the logistics operators that were supplying and moving the products had staff effects from COVID. That's why it happened, as in so many other logistics chains around the country. For the Labor Party to expect that one part of the economy and one part of the community won't be impacted by COVID when the rest is is just completely naive, and it shows how much they're prepared to play politics with the pandemic rather than actually deal with the pandemic. They're not interested in finding solutions. They're not interested in actually dealing with the issues that are real—and they are real for that provider, who's made comment to the local media. We're interested in dealing with the problems, and that's what we'll continue to do.