Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] The Leader of the Opposition said a few weeks ago that COVID is like an X-ray: it highlights and it lays bare the situation that we face across our country. Well, there is one matter that COVID has made completely transparent, and that is the type of leader who today runs our country. It doesn't really need to be said that the Prime Minister exercises more power across our nation than any other single person. Yet there is a really clear pattern emerging here: when Australia is in crisis, when there are failures and when there are difficulties, it is always someone else's fault. That is not leadership. It is not leadership to take credit for good news but to run from bad news. But, during COVID so far, that's what we've learnt about the leadership of the Prime Minister. I want to talk a little bit about some of the examples of where we've seen that during COVID. But, actually, this has been quite a consistent theme that I have observed over the two years during which the Prime Minister has been in this chair.

You will remember, Deputy Speaker, the horrible bushfires that ravaged large parts of our country during December-January. Twenty per cent of our country was on fire. A billion animals died over that summer. And what did we see this Prime Minister, the most powerful man in the country, doing? Well, he was missing in action for quite a long time, and then he popped up on radio, and his response to this was, 'I don't hold the hose; I don't run the control centre.' It was petulant and, frankly, I found it a bit pathetic that the person who has more power than anyone else in our country would essentially dismiss any responsibility at what was one of our country's greatest hours of need.

Robodebt is another really good example. This has been a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of Australians where the Australian government decided that it would write aggressive, nasty legalese letters to some of the most vulnerable people around our country demanding that they repay a debt to Centrelink. More than 400 young people died soon after receiving their letter under robodebt. This scheme was morally wrong, and we found out later that it was illegal. This has Scott Morrison's fingerprints all over it, because the Prime Minister created this scheme while he was in the Treasury office and he oversaw this scheme continuously while he was Prime Minister. But what did we see when we saw that the scheme was going wrong? We got a really mealy-mouthed apology from the Prime Minister—one I, frankly, would not accept from one of my own children—and we've still had no proper inquiry into what went wrong in that program, one of the biggest public policy disasters I've observed in the time that I've been in this parliament.

Another really good example is sports rorts. This was a genuine outrage where we saw a government minister take the taxpayer dollars that are paid by hardworking Australians and use them in a way that was highly political to try to win marginal seats in an election. It was completely wrong. We know, with absolutely completely black-and-white evidence, that the Prime Minister's office was up to its neck in this, because we know there were emails going back and forth debating which different groups who perhaps were not eligible for the funding would be getting funding through the program. And what happened at the end? The Prime Minister sent a minister out to take the hit for that and washed his hands of the whole affair. He effectively just said, 'The minister is responsible; I had nothing to do with it,' when we know that that was not the truth.

I want to talk a bit about aged care, because this is probably the most profoundly disappointing, disparaging and awful point of the Prime Minister not taking responsibility for things he is clearly in control of. There is no question that aged care is a federal responsibility. What has happened to older Australians living in aged care under COVID has been utterly disgraceful. From what we can see, even though, as soon as Newmarch House occurred, it was obvious that we were going to have outbreaks in aged care, basically the Prime Minister stood back and did very little to prepare the sector for this. We've got almost 500 deaths now in aged care around the country, and what does the Prime Minister do? He just says that basically this is a lack of investment over many, many years. Well, this Prime Minister has been part of a government for seven years. You do not get to say that after seven years when you have had the power to fix these problems.

There are many other examples. We talked a little bit before about the Ruby Princess. But I just want to leave the House with one question. I really wonder, when I see these examples and when I look at the Prime Minister: if you don't want to be responsible, why did you seek this role? You have the power to affect things as they change around our country, and today you're washing your hands whenever anything goes wrong. It's not leadership and it's not good enough. (Time expired)

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