Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Auditor-General's Performance audit: Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. I have to say I was shocked when I heard that the Auditor-General had even done a report into the rollout, because the Auditor-General wouldn't know what he's talking about. We should also remember that the Auditor-General is an ex-Labor staffer who has been shown in the past to be partisan, as we saw with the Leppington Triangle.

I want to make this very clear. The World Health Organization came out in September 2020 and said that the vaccine would not be ready for another nine months because there needed to be greater safety testing. They needed to do much more safety testing of the vaccine. Lo and behold! Six weeks later, about a week after President Biden was elected and after trying to find a vaccine for 40 years, three different pharmaceutical companies had suddenly found a vaccine. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a bit too much of a coincidence for my liking.

For Senator Steele-John to be saying that the Morrison government didn't do everything it could to roll out the vaccine in time, when just six weeks earlier the World Health Organization had been saying that the vaccine wouldn't be ready till June 2021, is complete rubbish. How can you make a plan when there hadn't been a vaccine, when a vaccine hadn't even been invented? They had been searching for a vaccine for up to 40 years, and they certainly have never used an mRNA encased in a lipid at all. So to suddenly blame the Morrison government for not rolling out a vaccine that wasn't properly tested on immunocompromised people—remember that, Senator Jordon Steele-John. It wasn't tested on immunocompromised people. It wasn't tested on people who were getting anti-immune tablets at all. So for you to be claiming it wasn't rolled out fast enough isn't actually true at all. As it turns out, we still have had one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world, not because of the vaccine, I might add, but because we kept the country locked down for two years.

The best part of the country was locked down for two years, and you're still complaining—you and your mate the Auditor-General, who we know can't be trusted, because he couldn't actually know the difference between an agricultural zone and an industrial zone and ran partisan politics. I will be writing to the Attorney-General about his inability to remain impartial—the Auditor-General.

I will be writing to the Attorney-General about his inability to remain impartial. Why would he suddenly find the urgency to have to do a report into the rollout of the COVID vaccine? This guy would not have a clue, and we should also point out that he never once talked on what the TGA did. I will quote that Pfizer never tested the spike protein in humans. How can you roll out something that's never been actually tested on somebody and then say it's safe and effective? But did the Auditor-General raise that? No, no. I would suggest that the Attorney-General should really take a good look at his own position. I don't think it's right that he stays in this position, given than he's an ex-Labor staffer. He was a staffer back in the late eighties for a Hawke-Keating government minister. I think, because he's meant to be impartial, he should reconsider his position. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted.

Question agreed to.