Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice she asked today relating to the COVID-19 outbreak in New South Wales.

As a senator for the great state of New South Wales, I say to the people: do not let this Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, who in cahoots with Gladys Berejiklian, the Premier of New South Wales, delivered the lockdown that we are all suffering—

Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Canavan, on a point of order?

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise on a small point of order: I think Senator O'Neill's mic was off during the beginning of her contribution.

Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Would you start again, please, Senator O'Neill?

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm more than happy to start again, but the whole beginning of my contribution was interrupted by people who just don't care and will just play their game of words while, literally, New South Wales is in a lockdown such as has never been seen in the history of this country. As a senator for New South Wales, I am so disgusted with what's going on in my home state. Three hundred and forty-four cases were reported just today, with 62 in ICU. There have been 34 deaths.

I want to formally commence with my acknowledgement of the civic leadership shown by Mr Khalil Ibrahim and his family by coming forward, in the depth of their grief at the loss of their mother and father, Kaoukab and Hachem, and going on the record to deliver a health literacy message and some hope to the people of New South Wales—telling the truth about what's going on, because you're not going to get the truth from the government in this place. They don't know how to tell it straight any day of the week. To Khalil and his family: I send you my condolences on your great loss. I am standing up here for our community because this government is incapable of standing up. They are incoherent in their messaging. Even the best Australians trying to do the right thing cannot get access to the very vaccines that they need to protect them. In fact, in this poor family, Kaoukab and Hachem were waiting. To make it worse, the family discovered that Hachem and Kaoukab were waiting in the backlog to get their vaccination. That is a fact. That is the fact that's facing many of the 62 who are in ICU because they couldn't get a vaccination. How many of the 344 who were announced today as the latest people in New South Wales with COVID couldn't get a vaccination? Thirty-four people have died in just this outbreak alone, and it's because the government didn't do its job.

There's the incoherent messaging, perhaps very succinctly outlined in the cartoon by Golding: a picture of synchronised swimming, described as 'synchronised spinning', with the Prime Minister. It has an image of the Prime Minister with his hand raised and saying, 'We're at the front of the queue,' and in the second image he says, 'We're at the back of the queue.' In the next image, he says, 'It's not a race,' and in the following image he says, 'Okay, it is a race.' Then he says, 'I'm confident NSW can get it done without shutting down,' before saying, 'Shutting down is the only way.' That kind of spinning is exactly what we see in this chamber day after day, while New South Wales is confronting the horror of a COVID outbreak that was entirely preventable if the proper advice had been followed. Instead, we saw the Bondi let-off, we saw the gold standard pumped up by the Prime Minister, and now everyone in New South Wales is failing.

We have doctors in New South Wales telling it like it is, giving warnings that need to be heeded, but not just by the people of New South Wales who are lining up trying to get vaccines and can't get them because this government failed to buy them when they were required. On the record from an experienced respiratory specialist is the claim that New South Wales is suffering from not just the disease and the lack of vaccines but also a failure of leadership. It's the confusing messaging. In New South Wales, I talk to my family. I FaceTime with them because I can't be with them; we're all locked away from one another. We can't get clarity on the message. Is the current strategy to lock down and eliminate COVID or are we trying to vaccinate our way out of it? The people in New South Wales have no sense of the real direction of this government, and the cost is lives.

I want to close my contribution by saying politics does matter. The decisions of this government are having a real and significant impact on the lives of people. I particularly want to thank the heroes of this pandemic—scientists, doctors, nurses, those in aged care, disability workers, cleaners and other essential workers—who are out there doing their best and telling the truth, not spinning it every day and failing to stand up and lead in the way that this government is now absolutely known for. (Time expired)

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too want to start my remarks by paying condolences to Khalil's family, which Senator O'Neill mentioned. It is a personal tragedy for so many families through this pandemic when lives are lost. Hundreds of Australians' lives have been lost through what is a terrible pandemic.

Before I get to the issues that Senator O'Neill raised, it is always very important for us to reflect about why we're suffering through this pandemic, and we must always remember that the reason this is happening—the reason four million people have died around the world—is the gross cover-up of the Chinese Communist Party. They are to blame for this and they deserve condemnation constantly for their lack of ability to be upfront with the world about this virus. Whether or not it came from the lab, which is an open question, they certainly should be condemned for their cover-up of what they knew was going on and what has been unleashed on the world.

Given what was unleashed on the world, this government has been upfront that not everything has gone right, that not every decision, in hindsight, is what we would have chosen to do, and we have accepted that. We understand that. But, on any measure, this country has managed this pandemic as well as, if not better than, almost every other country in the world. Most importantly, of course, people have been largely kept alive more than in other countries. We have, largely, kept people safe, but we have not been able to stop every fatality. No government can guarantee that.

Senator O'Neill spoke a lot about the past and, as I say, there are legitimate criticisms to make of government decisions and responses, but I don't think there is any government in the world you can point to and say, 'That's perfect; they've done everything right.' At these sorts of times, that is an impossible goal to aim for. What we do need, and what would be better from the opposition here, is: What do we do in the future? What do we do going forward now? Here is where the opposition, in particular, is showing a distinct lack of leadership and a distinct lack of forthrightness with the Australian people, because they seem to be at least implying that somehow all we need to do is make the right decisions and everything will go away. We will have zero COVID and there will be no fatalities. They are putting forward a proposal for a dreamland that does not exist. Anyone in this place—anyone who thinks of themselves as a leader of this nation—who propagates such a myth is no leader, because they haven't got the guts to be upfront with the Australian people about the challenges we face and how we are going to respond to those challenges in the months to years ahead.

It is almost certain, as Professor Shine rightly said today in the Australian Financial Review, that the coronavirus, unfortunately—coming from the Chinese Communist Party or thanks to the Chinese Communist Party—will be with us forever. It will be somewhere around the world forever. So what's the plan to deal with that? What is the plan? We cannot lock down forever. We cannot impose these massive, cruel costs on the poorest in our society forever. Like Senator O'Neill, I recognise the tireless efforts of our frontline health workers, but we should also recognise the efforts of poorer people in society who have had their incomes taken away from them and their livelihoods stripped. Their ability to see and congregate with their family members, including dying relatives, has been restricted by our responses to this crisis. Those things have to be considered as well, and we have to come to a point where we make mature decisions as a nation in responding to threats as severe as this one that is facing us. If we fail to do that, we will divide our community and we will never get to a conclusion where we can move forward into some sort of manageable way of dealing with this virus from the Chinese Communist Party. But, if we continue to propagate false hope, we will not be able to show leadership to the Australian people, we won't be able to take them with us and it will lead to much, much worse outcomes from the coronavirus over the long term.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Senator Canavan ought to hang his head in shame. He talks about division and creating division in the community. I can't think of too many people who have gone to greater effort than Senator Canavan to propagate misinformation, to undermine the public health message and to send out conspiracy theories. He, Senator Rennick and the member for Dawson—all of them out there on the coalition backbench—are undermining public health messages, making it tough for the health authorities, creating doubt in people's minds about whether the virus exists or whether the lockdown measures are appropriate, and creating doubts about vaccines. Senator Canavan ought not to come in here unless he apologises for the damage that he has done to the national interest.

The role of the National Party in this has been appalling. In March, the then Minister for Regional Health, Regional Communications and Local Government told the other place:

Regional Australia has been probably the safest place on the planet …

He went on to say:

… this rollout is about demography, not geography. So when your age group or particular group is ready to be vaccinated, the rollout in regional Australia is exactly the same as it is in the cities.

The Deputy Prime Minister told the Insiders program, when asked a few weeks ago how the rollout was going out in regional Australia, 'It's going very well.' Well, nothing could be further from the truth. This has been a story of complacency from the National Party and of undermining the public health messages.

What have we got now? Dubbo, Armidale, Tamworth, the Northern Rivers and the Hunter all in lockdown. All of these are regions with vaccination rates well below the national average. While there was a chance to vaccinate regional New South Wales, the National Party were entirely focused on themselves. The Deputy Prime Minister was too busy doing the numbers in Canberra to address the rollout failures in his own electorate, where the vaccination numbers are catastrophically low. He even replaced the minister responsible for the vaccine rollout in regional Australia, not because of his failure in standing up for regional communities and delivering vaccines but because he voted the wrong way. Then there's the Nationals member for Dawson, who's using his privileged role in this parliament to actively spread disinformation about COVID-19, without any rebuke from the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister and egged on by extremists like Senator Canavan and Senator Rennick.

Senator Canavan himself published an op-ed full of half-baked calculations which would embarrass his former employer at the Productivity Commission. He said that the public health measures were too expensive. He's since tweeted:

Yes Delta is more transmissible but it is less deadly so we don't need to lockdown. End the lockdowns!

Well, you can be sure of one thing: Senator Canavan will never have to attend a hospital bed and intubate a seriously ill patient. He will never have to clean a patient who is in a coma. He will never have to talk to the grieving relatives of a patient with COVID-19 who has died. He will continue to just propagate his keyboard warrior theories and promote disinformation and division within the Australian community, and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

The result of all of this division and all of this complacency is more lockdowns extending their reach into regional Australia, where the health outcomes have always been worse. The result of the 'no lockdown' approach of Senator Canavan would be regional hospitals overwhelmed, more deaths and more disabilities. He is a propagator of a COVID-19 death cult. He ought to stop, the member for Dawson ought to stop, Senator Rennick ought to stop and the Prime Minister should actually have the courage to stand up to them, to rebuke them publicly and to send out, for once, a clear and coherent public health message and do the job that this Prime Minister's supposed to have done: deliver vaccines for Australia. (Time expired)

James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's my honour to serve the Senate, and through it my constituents, as the deputy chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19. Thinking back to a year ago, when that committee was established in the early stages of the pandemic, I remember quite well the bipartisan spirit in which it was established. The committee was proposed through this chamber on a unanimous basis, and its early work in particular, led by Senator Gallagher, was admirably bipartisan.

Unfortunately I think what's happened over time is that pressure has been brought to bear on that committee and on Labor MPs and senators to walk away from the bipartisan spirit by which the early response to COVID-19 was characterised and to seek to make partisan opportunities from the pandemic. I was listening very carefully to the contributions of Senator O'Neill and Senator Ayres, and I have a lot of empathy for them—as New South Wales senators—for what they, their families and their constituents are going through. But in listening to their contributions I couldn't decide whether their memories are just short—so short that they are as short as the memory of a goldfish—or just selective.

In Senator O'Neill's contribution she said the lockdown in New South Wales is something that has never before been seen in the history of this country. Well, Senator O'Neill, when the restrictions lift in New South Wales, as I hope they soon do—when the border closures soon come to an end—I encourage you to come to Melbourne and try to tell Victorians that the lockdown New South Wales underwent has never before been seen in the history of this country. I think you might be interested by the response you get, because of course Victorians remember the very long 111-day lockdown they endured. I hope New South Wales does not have to suffer what Victorians suffered.

Labor senators, throughout question time, talked about the 34 very tragic deaths that have occurred so far in the outbreak in New South Wales. Indeed they are tragic, and indeed that is 34 deaths more than any Australian would like to see. Unfortunately, it makes me recall the more than 800 deaths that occurred in Victoria last year in our lockdown. Sadly, we have been here before. Senator Ayres, in his contribution, talked about the misinformation that had been contributed in this debate yet, curiously, omitted from his attacks on some others in this place any criticism of his own colleagues in the way in which they've contributed to misinformation in this debate.

He could have talked about the misinformation his own leader, Mr Albanese, has fuelled, particularly the scepticism around the AstraZeneca vaccine and the way in which Mr Albanese has not been able to bring himself to endorse what we know is a safe and effective vaccine, approved by our Therapeutic Goods Administration. He could have thought about his own New South Wales colleague Mr Husic, the shadow minister, who, in his own instance of misinformation a few weeks ago, said Australia does not have any sovereign domestic vaccine manufacturing capability. I hope it was just an error and not an outright lie. Either way, it was a case of misinformation.

He could have thought about the Labor Party's hand-picked candidate in Higgins, who, on her social media pages like Twitter and in an episode of Q&A has baselessly undermined the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine in a way that is very dangerous, given the millions of doses of that vaccine and the domestic manufacturing capacity of that vaccine that we have. We know from the modelling released by the Peter Doherty Institute just a few weeks ago that there is a statistically insignificant difference in efficacy between the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine. Yet we've seen, repeatedly, significant hesitation in our community to take the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the way in which it's been undermined.

They could have instead taken the route of some of their more responsible colleagues. I pay tribute to the member for Maribyrnong, Mr Shorten, who visited the AstraZeneca facility in Melbourne, the CSL facility, and congratulated the workers for the amazing work they're doing producing an Australian-made vaccine for this virus. Senator Ciccone in this place has equally promoted AstraZeneca and encouraged his constituents to take it up, and Mr Bowen in the other place has encouraged them to take it up.

Finally, though, I have to say that I was surprised by my friend Senator Gallagher's question, the final question in question time today. It seems to me that she's not familiar with the road map agreed to by the national cabinet—by all state premiers and the Prime Minister—the final phase of which is that, when we hopefully get to those higher rates of vaccination: manage COVID-19 as an infectious disease like any other in the community. That's the world that all Australians aspire to. That's the world that we should be striving to. And we should do so on a bipartisan basis. (Time expired)

Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make comment on this motion of Senator O'Neill to take note of Senator Birmingham's responses to questions. Here in New South Wales today, we've seen another 344 new COVID-19 cases. There are currently 374 people in hospital and 62 people in intensive care. There have been 34 deaths, which means that actually our hearts should be going out to those who have lost their loved ones. But we have a defence from the government, in this taking note. The Nationals senator's defence, Trump-like, is that it was China's fault. So he doesn't want to hold anyone else to account. Then the senator who spoke before me said that we should not question the failings of the government. Well, it is our responsibility to question what the government is doing with this lockdown. It's critically important that a spotlight, as disinfectant, be put on what the government is doing and how the government is performing. It is in the national interest to ensure that we do get proper answers, unlike what we've been seeing through question time.

We're nearly two months into lockdown here in Greater Sydney, and, unfortunately, we are seeing other parts of the state join in: the Hunter Valley, New England, Byron Shire, the Richmond Valley, Lismore, Ballina Shire and now Tamworth and Dubbo. Case numbers are continuing to head in the wrong direction.

Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a powerful opinion piece from a Western Sydney doctor who is gravely concerned about the situation in western and south-western Sydney. The doctor said:

NSW is almost certainly on the precipice of a massive deterioration. Contact tracers are overwhelmed, with reporting of infection hotspots lagging by days. The whole strategy of relying on contact tracing for infection control is failing, or indeed has failed.

This very brave whistleblower has spoken out. We've got to be asking questions about where we're up to in the fight against COVID-19. This specialist from Western Sydney has also given us a stark warning on what the situation is on the ground here in Sydney.

How did it come to this? There are some obvious failings. There's the botched vaccine rollout that Mr Morrison said isn't a race; there is the failure to set up a national quarantine system, which has seen a leak from hotel quarantine on average every nine days; there is the failure to supply vaccines to pharmacies, with just 25 per cent of authorised pharmacies now putting jabs into arms; there is the failure of the Morrison government to stop its own members of parliament from spreading outrageous misinformation.

In the time I have left, I just want to go to one other brave whistleblower, from Sydney Airport, who has spoken about how the drivers and now the entire country were let down by lazy and negligent processes—particularly when we then turn to the poor limo driver, who has been singled out and ostracised for being Patient Zero in the latest outbreak. Passenger buses there are used to transport international arrivals to hotel quarantine. They are cleaned comprehensively by cleaners in full PPE between every single trip at the airport. That's best practice. The Australian Defence Force has been brought in to load luggage into these buses in a COVID-safe manner. That is best practice. But, for the international crew on passenger or freight flights, none of these systems are in place. The vehicles used to transport crew from the airport to the hotel are not cleaned. They're not cleaned at the airport. They are not cleaned between trips. If a crew member with COVID sits in one of these minivans, then every other crew member who sits in the vehicle for the rest of the day, or even days later, is stepping into a viral bomb. Not only does the Australian Defence Force not load bags into these vehicles, but the drivers are forced to do everything themselves—whilst these bags aren't being loaded appropriately by defence personnel—without PPE, except maybe a face mask.

How is that happening? It's happening because of government inaction and incompetence. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.