Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a stark contrast it was to hear the excellent first speech of Senator Mirabella, full of positivity. It was uplifting, it was sincere, it was about service to the nation, from the sort of senator and public servant we actually want and need in this place. That speech was such a contrast to that which we had heard earlier from the Labor Party in this so-called MPI. They want to blame Mr Morrison for everything. In fact, the motion starts: 'Mr Morrison's disastrous summer'. Well, I suppose they blame him that it was a bit of colder summer than usual, that the barbeque gas ran out or that the kids got sunburnt—really?

What are the Labor Party on about when they come into this place, day after day, with their relentless negativity and their commentary on everything that is wrong without pausing to consider they might actually be presenting themselves as an alternative government. There's not a whisper as to what they would be doing differently. What we hear is just this tirade of negativity, including, might I add—because I find it amazing, and we heard it in question time today and again in the contribution from the Labor speaker just before the first speech by Senator Mirabella—about the underpaid workers in aged care. There is no doubt that aged-care workers do a fantastic job. There is no doubt that they are low-paid workers. But who sets their wage rates? It is not the government. It is not the Prime Minister. It is an independent tribunal known as Fair Work Australia. I wonder who set that up and then stacked it with their people? It was the Australian Labor Party. It is the Australian Labor Party's mechanism for wage fixation in this country. So, when the Labor Party come into this place, day after day, complaining about the low wages for aged-care workers, it is a double-whammy criticism of the trade union movement that is allegedly looking after these people and also of the independent umpire who determines the wages.

The Australian Labor Party, like with so many other things, seek to have it both ways. They say, day after day, that the Liberal and National parties cannot change the fair work legislation, and we haven't in this regard. It is the legislation as put down by Ms Gillard, Prime Minister Rudd—remember him?—and Mr Shorten. That mechanism remains in place. So each and every day when the Labor Party complain about somebody's wages and/or conditions they are complaining about the decision-making process of the organisation that they themselves established.

It therefore begs the question: what would Labor do if they were in government? Would they sack the Fair Work Commission for not providing sufficient wages to aged-care people or would they somehow legislate wages and start having this parliament determining who gets paid what and when, how and why? Surely not! So this is a vacuous criticism that they offer, day after day, in a vain attempt to con the Australian people into believing that somehow they might be able to do a better job.

We know that the Labor Party are devoid of any future policy positioning. If they had good future policies, instead of putting up these motions as they do, day after day, full of relentless negativity, they'd be saying, 'We call on the government to adopt Labor policy in this particular area,' and they would set out the Labor policy seriatim—(a), (b), (c), (d) et cetera—and tell the Australian people exactly what they want and what their aspiration is for the Australian people. But they have no aspiration for the Australian people. They only have an aspiration for themselves to somehow cheat their way into government by offering continual criticism of a government that has been, in exceptionally difficult circumstances, delivering for the people of Australia.

Let's be clear: in the three years of this government, we've seen 1.1 million jobs created since the pandemic hit. Do you know what? The Labor shadow Treasurer said that the one test the Morrison government has to pass is the unemployment rate—will it hit a certain level or not? Well, the unemployment rate is well below expectations. So by Labor's standard, the standard, the one standard by which Labor said the Liberal-National government should be judged—namely, the employment level—the Morrison government has passed with flying colours. It is not me, a Liberal senator, asserting this; it is, by implication, the Australian Labor Party asserting this. They set the test, and the test the Labor Party set for the Liberal-National government has been passed with flying colours whether the Labor Party likes it or not.

So, having set us a benchmark, which we as a government have surpassed, what else is Labor to offer than to pick up any little rock that is available and throw it at us. There is no positivity here, there is no vision for the future, there is no policy platform on which to see the nation come out of this COVID pandemic. We as a nation are doing relatively well. Can we do better? Of course we can do better, and that is what the government continually strives for day after day. But what this nation does not need is a group of individuals who have only one vision, and that is for them to be elected to government.

For Labor to be elected to government, the Australian people need the full policy platform—what they would actually do, what they would do differently, and how. It's no use saying, 'We would have done better in this area or that area.' Tell us how that would have been achieved with all the constrictions and restraints that COVID has placed upon us. There have been 1.1 million jobs created, surpassing Labor's test. And I'm sure that the hapless Labor shadow Treasurer, in setting us this task on unemployment, thought we would fail it. He put that benchmark up in lights for everybody to see—only to see us not only match it but overwhelmingly surpass it. So, humiliated, the Labor Party retreats to what it is exceptionally good at, and that is throwing rocks and offering criticism. But they are incapable of providing a positive agenda—and the record of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer speaks for itself.

I have concentrated on that which the Labor Party set us a benchmark, but let's have a look at 1,400 additional nurse placement for the regions; $1 billion to help with Closing the Gap; and 93 per cent of Indigenous children enrolled in preschool, which is up from 77 per cent in 2016. You can go through policy parameter after policy parameter and see achievement by this government in the most difficult of circumstances. The ministry has performed exceptionally well, and the benchmarks set by the Australian Labor Party have been met and achieved—indeed, overachieved. So all Labor does is come in here and provide their relentless negativity and no real alternative for the people of Australia. That is why motions such as this, which are put forward by the Labor Party day after day, should be rejected. If I were in the opposition, I would be putting forward a positive platform; but, devoid of that, all they do is throw rocks.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I note that the federal and state governments have had a disastrous two years of COVID mismanagement—not just one summer. Go out the front of this building and have a listen. Go anywhere in Australia and have a listen. Australia has seen a repeated failure to learn and do better from one year to the next—and it's now counting in years. The failure of this government to modify the COVID response as more information has emerged about the science of this virus is criminal incompetence.

Our competitive federalism model has been mocked and abused and buried, in some perverse game of pass the parcel, so that everyday Australians can have no clear idea of who is to blame for this mess. I know who's to blame: it's all of you. All of you have waved through ill-prescribed and illogical measures for more than two years. One after the other, from one state to another, the same science and data on COVID has been translated into wildly different responses, depending upon the ideology and personality flaws of the premiers and chief ministers of the day and the federal ministers. Yet on each occasion, with each different policy, the phrase was the same: trust the science, but don't show us the science.

The last two years have seen a litany of nonsense and lies—lie after lie, dressed up as medicine and science. Here are just some of them: the unresolved definition of 'a hotspot'; the inability to agree on sensible measures for border communities; the seemingly arbitrary closing of borders and the locking down of communities for minor outbreaks, while then being allowed to open up during major outbreaks, which was just incredible to see; marginalising the unvaccinated in some states but not in others; the changing definition of 'fully vaccinated'; and making commitments to people and then contradicting them.

As a nation we have been held captive to measures that have divided our communities; coerced us into a medical procedure in order to keep our jobs; and denied us freedom of choice over our bodies, over when we can open our businesses, over where we can travel, over whether we can see our family or friends and over whether we can attend a funeral or a wedding. Any dissent has been kept suppressed by media accomplices. The media have crafted the narrative into a singular, government sanctioned message—essentially, propaganda and lies.

Disasters and calamities can have a powerful galvanising effect for communities, as we see during bushfires and floods. Yet during COVID, our governments have successfully eroded our cohesiveness as an Australian nation. They've fractured it. This is the first time I've seen a national emergency responded to by dividing Australians instead of uniting against the common threat. Instead of helping one another, we find ourselves treating others like lepers and retreating from anyone who coughs or sniffles. We've been brainwashed into division, disrespect, telling lies and telling tales on anyone we believe isn't being compliant.

The federal government have squandered the opportunity to bring Australia together as a nation, by letting the states and territories run wild with stupidity and deceit: Liberal, Labor, Nationals and Greens—governments all. Historically, our ADF are brought in to help domestically in catastrophic and emergency situations, so it says a lot about how the state and federal governments have mishandled the response to COVID, when, after two years of COVID experience, we need 1,700 ADF personnel to go into our aged-care sector because the staff have left; they've had to because they've been threatened with a forced vaccination. Debacle after debacle have left our aged-care sector completely under-resourced. Staffing has been ravaged by vaccine mandates and unreasonable close-contact rules.

It makes no sense to me that Labor would try to pin this on the Morrison-Joyce government alone, when the Labor Party—when this parliament, both state and federal parliaments—waved these measures through for two years. To steal a line from Driving Miss Daisy: 'Senator Brown, you took that turn with the government.' It's too late now to dodge the blame. You're all to blame. The unnecessary deaths within aged care from government incompetence are heartbreaking, shameful, immoral and inhuman. So too are the continual lockdowns of elderly residents, which have prevented the elderly from seeing their families, leading some to believe they've been abandoned. It is not their families who have abandoned them; it's this parliament. It's all of you. The disrespect shown to our elderly is breathtaking.

While there are ethical questions about the balance between opening up and our most vulnerable being exposed to COVID, there's absolutely no acceptable excuse for the state and federal governments' logistical failures during this entire atrocious mess. How can we do this to our families and communities? We're still stumbling as a nation two years later! The federal and state leaders have gutted the dignity and rights of everyday Australians through their ineptness and unprecedented thirst for power and control, at a time when Australians needed hope, reassurance, leadership and confidence in their leaders. Is it any wonder that this incompetence, arrogance and hubris have brought protesters onto the streets in their millions? (Time expired)

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

I rise to make a contribution on this matter of public importance. According to the minister for aged care, the aged-care system has been coping with the omicron variant extremely well. That is a direct quote: 'extremely well'. That is an opinion that the minister might have formed from his VIP seats at the fifth Ashes test. Of course, if the minister had done his job and fronted up to the Senate committee on COVID-19 instead of fobbing us off to go to the cricket, then the minister would know that the aged-care system is not actually coping extremely well. Usually, if a system is coping extremely well, you don't have to call the military in to provide emergency support! If the minister, instead of going to the cricket, had done his job and talked to aged-care residents and families—or just simply read the paper—he would have known things are not going extremely well. He would know that more than 500 Australians in aged care died from COVID-19 in January alone. But the government says, 'Don't worry about that.' The minister for health said 60 per cent of those who died in aged care 'were in the absolute last days of their lives'. How is that for a message from the Morrison government? 'In the absolute last days of their lives'—that's how it described those people who lost their lives due to COVID. What a reassurance from the government to those people who lost loved ones and those who fear losing their loved ones! I doubt that that provides any support to the families of those who have tragically passed away. Is this really the point we've gotten to in the government's handling of the pandemic, that we are now just brushing away hundreds of preventable deaths as being insignificant?

What's going on in our aged-care sector is unprecedented in Australian history. The fact is that the vaccine rollout had started months and months behind. If the booster rollout had not started months behind, we might have been in a better position. Then we would not have seen hundreds of unboostered aged-care residents tragically passing away in January. But that is the aged-care system the government insists is performing extremely well. If the minister had spoken to aged-care providers instead of going to the cricket, he would have known that this isn't the case. Mike Baird, a former Liberal premier of New South Wales and current CEO of aged-care provider HammondCare, has been calling for the Australian Defence Force to be called into the aged-care sector since mid-January. It took more than three weeks for the government to heed that call—and, as always with this government, it's too little too late.

If the minister had spoken to aged-care workers instead of going to the cricket, he would know things are not going extremely well. Aged-care workers are under unbelievable stress. They can't access rapid antigen tests. They can't access enough PPE. They can't access enough N95 masks. It has been a year since the aged-care royal commission handed down its final report. Let's remind ourselves of what the report said:

Australia's aged care system is understaffed and the workforce underpaid and undertrained.

…   …   …

The bulk of the aged care workforce does not receive wages and enjoy terms and conditions of employment that adequately reflect the important caring role they play.

…   …   …

Inadequate staffing levels, skill mix and training are principal causes of substandard care in the current system.

That's what the aged-care commission made very clear—and it couldn't have been clearer to anyone reading those words. There's a link between the conditions of the aged-care workforce and the quality of care. A year on, the government hasn't learnt a single thing.

Unlike the minister, aged-care workers aren't blowing off work for VIP tickets to the Ashes. Aged-care workers, most of whom are in insecure and precarious jobs, are being pushed to the limit. Nine in 10 aged-care workers are either casual or part time. They are in danger of their shifts being swapped, or cut, at the drop of a hat. Many are expected to remain on call all day, every day. Last year Sherree Clarke, a casual aged-care nurse, told the job security committee:

You can't plan anything because you don't know what your roster is going to be from one fortnight to the next. When my mother went through cancer, I couldn't tell her that I would support her for her cancer appointments, because if you're not available to pick up a shift, they don't offer you that shift the next time.

For all of this, they are woefully underpaid. These are people tasked with looking after our parents and our grandparents. These workers are sometimes responsible for every facet of senior Australians' day-to-day lives, and they're receiving barely above the minimum wage.

Another casual aged-care worker, Anu Singh, told the job security committee last year that at her workplace there were just two carers for 20 residents. They would have 20 minutes with each resident. She said:

In those 20 minutes, we used to wake up our residents, who were about 90 years old, and do showering, toileting, dressing and undressing; tidy up their rooms; make their beds; and then take them slowly to their dining. Can you imagine doing all this just for yourself in 20 minutes?

That's while making barely above the minimum wage. And this was even before the pandemic. Does it sound like the aged-care system is doing extremely well? On top of that, there's the completely botched COVID-19 response. So I support in the strongest terms the Health Services Union's comments and I call on the government to back the HSU's application for a decent wage rise for aged-care workers. It's the absolute least this government can do for those workers.

The other point I want to cover is the stress the pandemic is having on the supply chains as a result of the government responses to these problems. We've seen workers at Teys meatworks in Naracoorte being forced to work while COVID positive. We've seen truck drivers and supply-chain workers forced to continue to work tirelessly to keep shelves stocked even as the government stands by and allows their jobs to be undermined by companies like Uber and Amazon—the race to the bottom. We've seen retail and logistics workers forced to continue working even without fair access to rapid antigen tests.

This week, the Retail Supply Chain Alliance came to Canberra to call for government backing for the new supply chain safety principles. The three principles are very simple but very important. The first is that we need COVID safety supply chains. That means free and accessible rapid antigen tests for transport, logistic and retail workers not just for their own personal safety but to keep all Australians safe and to keep supply chains running. The second principle is that we need to secure working conditions in supply chains. That means immediate government action to stop the race to the bottom on working conditions that is being driven by companies like Amazon. The third is that we need a supply-chain committee. Throughout this pandemic the government has failed to listen to advice from medical experts and from the industry. Instead of sensible planning and thoughtful solutions, we had ideas like children driving forklifts—just absurd! We need a committee that brings together government, industry, unions and workers to find real solutions to supply-chain issues and to ensure that we don't have any more stupid and deadly ideas like kids on forklifts.

Supply-chain workers, aged-care workers, health workers and workers across Australia deserve better than insecure work, wages failing to keep up with the cost of living and a shortage of rapid antigen tests. This government needs to act and it needs to act now. It's not a job well done.

Perin Davey (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to remind the chamber of the motion we're actually debating here tonight because that hasn't been clear in the contributions of those on the other side. This motion, which was put forward by Labor, talks about the disastrous COVID summer. It accuses the government of failing to listen to warnings, failing to take responsibility for ordering rapid antigen tests and failing to learn from past mistakes.

I wonder if Labor would have done anything differently. When you actually look at the time lines, when you actually look at what was happening right around the world, and when you consider the scientific and expert advice that we are always told we've got to listen to—listen to the experts, listen to the scientists, take on board what they're saying and act according to that advice.

Let me remind people that, even as late as August last year, the advice from the AHPPC discouraged the use of rapid antigen tests when the prevalence of COVID was low. In August last year, they said RATs should only be used as a precautionary surveillance measure, and they recommended their use only for healthcare settings. But, according to Labor, somehow we should have ignored that advice and pre-empted things even before the Therapeutic Goods Authority had approved RATs for home use. We were actually ahead of the game. As soon as the TGA approved point-of-care use of RATs, we entered into agreements with suppliers. We secured 4.45 million RATs and commenced a trial for point-of-care RAT testing in aged-care settings. But Labor would like to ignore that fact and pretend that it all only occurred over our summer. Our summer was the European winter, at which time the whole world was struggling to source enough RATs. But somehow we should have miraculously been able to access them, when the United States, Europe, the UK and Canada could not fulfil their own demand for RATs. We should have been immune to a global supply shortage during a global pandemic, according to Labor. That's just living in fairyland.

Don't forget, as well, that even after the TGA had approved use for RATs in home settings, even after the government had started a procurement program, the states had still not approved their use. Let's not forget that when omicron raised its ugly head in Australia in late November, and when the states responded by shutting their borders, it was the states who insisted that they would take nothing short of a PCR test as proof of COVID negativity. Queensland kept that up all the way until January, such that the demand for PCR tests in New South Wales went through the roof—not from people showing symptoms from COVID, not from who were close contacts, but from people who wanted to go on holiday and from people who wanted to visit their families. Senator Sheldon talks about the squeeze on our freight and supply chains. Well, the squeeze was exacerbated by these state based policy principles that required all truckies to have PCR tests because RATs weren't good enough. This was a state Labor government demanding PCR tests so that their trucks, carrying their groceries, could get over the border to deliver to their supermarket shelves.

Labor somehow thinks that we had a crystal ball. Somehow, according to Labor, we should have been able to foresee omicron. The World Health Organization only declared omicron a variant of concern on 26 November. By that stage, we had already entered into these RAT trials in aged-care settings. We had already commenced a procurement program. But we still didn't have omicron in our country, and no-one could have predicted the scourge that omicron brought.

I want to also talk about issues in aged-care settings. COVID has always represented a risk in aged care, from the very first COVID outbreak in aged care that occurred in New South Wales in 2020. We established a surge workforce to support facilities where staff were sidelined through COVID infection or being a close contact, or where they just needed support. This surge workforce has been in place ever since, available for every state and for any facility that requests it. To date that surge workforce has covered over 80,000 shifts. Yes, omicron is rapidly spreading at the moment and our workforce needs to adjust. Yes, we now have the Defence Force assisting in that area. But somehow Labor think they would have foreseen all this.

I want to take this opportunity to thank our aged-care workforce, the surge workforce and the Defence Force, who have all worked tirelessly to do their utmost to keep the residents of our aged-care facilities healthy and safe. I want to acknowledge that working in aged care is difficult at the best of times, regardless of COVID. It is a very sad fact that people in aged-care facilities pass on. It's worse when they pass on separated from their families due to quarantine requirements in response to a once-in-100-years pandemic. I feel for those who work in this situation and I feel for the families who have lost their loved ones. I don't care whether the resident has passed away from COVID, with COVID or without COVID; it's always sad. It's always a loss.

But Labor seem to be implying that, if they were in charge, things would be different. I want to know how. It's all well and good to stand here and throw stones when you've got no responsibility for cleaning up the shards of glass afterwards. How would Labor have addressed this situation to ensure that facilities were not locked down during the various waves of COVID, to ensure families still had access to their loved ones? I don't see how. I have family in hospital right now who cannot be visited by anyone, because they are all operating under COVID restrictions. We are operating under COVID restrictions in this place. But somehow Labor would wave a magic wand, and it wouldn't be occurring. How would Labor make sure that staff at our aged-care facilities would not come into contact with COVID and would be available for 100 per cent of their shifts so that they don't need a surge workforce or the Defence Force?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but you cannot judge our government on what you know now with hindsight. Judge us on where we are at today, on how we have responded and learnt and adapted to ensure we continue to have a strong economy, record low unemployment, one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world. I think we've done quite well, all things considered.

Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This summer has been a summer from hell for disabled people. It has been a summer of fear, a summer of isolation and a summer of death. Disabled people have died across our community, and the Morrison government bears responsibility. The incompetence! The absolute and total inability to listen to disabled people when we reach out to our government as we have done through every stage of this pandemic! At the beginning, when we thought we were going to drop dead any minute, we put everything aside. We put aside our historic knowledge of how we have suffered at the hands of this government. We put that aside and attempted to work to keep our community safe. We did so many hours of unpaid work. Organisations that have been structurally underfunded for the best part of a decade put everything on hold to come and sit with you people at a table and offer our best hopes, our lived experience and our expertise, with the sole goal of keeping our friends, our families and our loved ones alive. And you did what you always do: you took our good faith and you repaid it with tokenism. And, once we started to get a bit annoying, you shut us out of the process.

You failed us through the first wave. You failed to order the vaccine. You failed to roll the vaccine out. When it stopped working as it should have, you deprioritised us. You deprioritised disabled people to cover up your own incompetence. Through delta, you failed to get us PPE, you failed to invest in ventilation and you failed to order the tests that your own Prime Minister was saying at press conferences we would need. It all came to bear with omicron. Driven by your corporate donors who were so desperate to begin making money again, you rammed down the borders and the protective mechanisms. People like the Premier of New South Wales lectured the community about the need to stand up to COVID and to live with the pandemic. Well, for a disabled person, for an older person, for the immunocompromised and for First Nations people, there is no living with COVID-19. Unprotected, unvaccinated and unsupported, we die. We have died, and we will continue to die, under this government. You bear that responsibility.

We had so many chances as a nation to get this right. We had so many opportunities to order the right vaccines, to give people the money they needed to manage, to give people access to the PPE, to put ventilators in schools and to give people the confidence and the ability to manage this together. At every turn, because it was too inconvenient, because it cost your donors too much money and because it dared to suggest that there is such a thing as a society wherein we have a mutual obligation to one another, you rejected it. Two years in, not a single person in the Australian government can tell me how many disabled people have died, because nobody has been collecting the data. Every day, chief health officers and state premiers go out to the media and give the COVID death figures, but they assure us that so many of these people had underlying conditions, were at the end of life or had a terminal condition—complex, co-occurring morbidities. Forty per cent of the Australian population has either a disability or an underlying condition, and this government and state governments have written us off as an acceptable collateral casualty. It's not good enough. The Greens do not accept it. We will never accept it. We will always push back. (Time expired)

Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Across the country, millions of Australians have experienced a summer of COVID chaos that they simply did not need to have. There were more vaccine delays and a COVID testing disaster. There were critical staff shortages everywhere. It is yet another aged-care crisis, and none of it was inevitable—none of it. All of it was preventable, if only the Morrison government had listened to any of the experts who were ringing the alarm bells and saying that the government needed a plan to open up safely.

At the end of last year, Prime Minister Morrison was out there urging us all to get used to 'COVID normal', saying that it was time for government to get out of our lives and revving us up for an open summer. But, unlike this Prime Minister, COVID doesn't like to take holidays, and the government should have had a plan for that. Instead, the Prime Minister checked out over the summer—again!—and he did that as the omicron wave hit. At that time, it was Australians who were ready. Australians wanted to do the right thing to protect their families and their communities. They wanted to get tested. They wanted to stay safe. They wanted to be able to go to work. They were ready, but the Morrison government was not.

Within days of restrictions, including travel restrictions, easing, we saw absolute chaos. We saw PCR testers being overwhelmed. We saw people lined up for miles waiting to get tested, only to be turned away. No-one could find a rapid antigen test across the country, and we were in crisis again—a crisis that was not inevitable—all because the Prime Minister failed to plan again. He failed to heed the warnings again. He failed to listen to the experts again. As early as September last year, the Australian Medical Association warned the government publicly—and we all knew—that they needed a plan for rapid antigen tests to support a safe reopening. The government rejected that advice, saying something about not wanting to intervene in the private market. We all saw what the private market did later on!

Then, in October, the government ignored the calls by the Council of Small Business to provide rapid antigen tests. They dismissed calls from small business that they needed RATs to keep their doors open. Even before that—a year before that—Australian manufacturers had approached the government about providing rapid antigen tests made here in Australia for Australians. What happened with that? Government sent them away. They said, 'We don't need them.' Meanwhile, other countries, who had real leaders who were on the ball, knew that they needed rapid antigen tests and started putting orders in with our Australian manufacturers. Why didn't Prime Minister Morrison do that? Why couldn't he see what was happening overseas? In the UK, free tests had been available since April 2021, and in Singapore they were in vending machines. But, despite all of these warnings and these representations from small business, from the manufacturers and from the medical experts, the government refused to heed any of these warnings. They refused to take the advice. The Morrison government simply failed to act, and they left Australians without a plan B. It was Australians who were left over the summer to pay the price for these failures, literally—at $10 to $15 per rapid antigen test, if you could get your hands on one.

I spoke to pharmacists in regional Victoria, and, out of 20 that I contacted over the summer, none knew when they were going to get any supply of rapid antigen tests. The Morrison government turned COVID testing and our health system into a lottery this summer, and Australians are still paying the price for that failure. (Time expired)

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

I thank you for this MPI today. I didn't get a question in question time, so it's wonderful to be able to answer a dorothy dixer—thank you. I say it's a dixer because it is clear to everyone that the Morrison government's COVID-19 response has been an overwhelming success. Has it been perfect? No. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that, as has the Leader of the Government in the Senate. However, the overall response to the pandemic by the Morrison government has been one of the best in the world. That is simply a fact. When it comes to dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic, there is no playbook. There is no history to guide the government or decision-makers on what has worked previously and what has not.

Labor love coming in here with their hindsight goggles on. I think their hindsight goggles work so well they could walk in here backwards! Maybe they could tell me how I could have avoided getting COVID over the summer, which was confirmed by a RAT which I bought at my local pharmacy. Undoubtedly things can go wrong, and they did, as we have acknowledged. But what is important is how we learn from these mistakes and how we respond to these lessons. This is something that the government has done extremely well on any measure.

You only have to look at the vaccine rollout last year. On 21 March, the Prime Minister announced publicly that the Australian government had a comprehensive plan to offer COVID-19 vaccines to all Australians by the end of October 2021. And guess what? We saw that actually occur. We hit 80 per cent vaccinated by the end of October. No-one said that the vaccine rollout was going to be a straight line or some perfect model that Labor seemed to think was the Prime Minister's one and only job to oversee. Sorry, is it two jobs that you think the Prime Minister does? It shows you're not fit for the job. Of course, it was going to ramp up exponentially. We delayed the rollout deliberately over summer because we did not have COVID in the country. We watched what other countries did. We learnt from how they rolled theirs out. We learnt those lessons and moved from there.

There were countries that had COVID outbreaks that were killing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people and needed the vaccine more than we did. They got it ahead of us, which I think we should all accept was the right thing. But we still met our promise to the Australian people. The Prime Minister made a promise and we met it. There were definitely hurdles along the way, such as the change of health advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine. However, the government responded to those changes, and now we are one of the world's most vaccinated countries. As it currently stands, Australia has over 95 per cent of the population vaccinated with a first dose and over 93 per cent protected with a second dose, which ranks us sixth out of all OECD countries in the world and must be celebrated as a remarkable achievement.

I think it's important to remind Senator Brown that the effects of the omicron outbreak have had global repercussions which have affected supply chains around the world. It is not just Australia where these supply chains were put under pressure. Globally, we have seen issues occurring. Luckily for us, the Morrison government acted swiftly and decisively to mitigate the squeeze on supply chains and worked with industry at every level to iron out these problems. Decisions, such as on the changes in food and grocery supply chain and close-contact arrangements, undoubtedly had a positive impact on these issues.

With all aspects of the COVID-19 response, the government has followed the expert medical advice. The first three rapid antigen self-tests were only approved by the TGA on 13 October, for supply from 1 November. We started from a different position because we didn't have massive outbreaks. We'd dealt with them at that time. RATs were not a suitable testing regime for delta. But, since then, the government has worked to ensure they are available to those who need them. The Commonwealth provides free RATs to residential aged-care facilities, for which we're responsible. We've already provided millions of RATs to residential aged-care centres. It is the Morrison government's response that has kept Australians safe while not destroying our economy, which the Labor Party would have done. (Time expired)

Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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