Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022 and other bills. I want to firstly talk about a bit of overall context and then go to some very specific issues around the budget, the challenges facing the nation and how they are playing out in my own electorate. There are two great challenges facing the nation and have been for 18 months now. One, of course, has been the COVID pandemic and, along with that, the health response required of the nation—of governments, of the population, of businesses—as we dealt with the global pandemic. There is also the economic challenge, and the budget that was unveiled by the government the last time we were here should be an opportunity to address the economic challenges that we face and to set a forward plan for how we come out of what was a hit to our economy—there is no doubt about it—and build a stronger future for families and communities.

I have—unsurprisingly, probably to this chamber—some serious concerns about both of those strands of challenge in front of our nation. I want to acknowledge that they don't sit separately. They actually are intimately intertwined. How well we get the health response in place will have a direct effect on how the economy performs and so these are very, very significant issues. Just on the response to the COVID pandemic, I want to say first of all that I think this government really needs to step its game up. The mixed messaging that has been a consistent feature of this government's response to the COVID pandemic is causing confusion and hesitancy about vaccines in our community. It is not uncommon in any week, whether or not parliament is sitting, to see media conferences with different government ministers, including the Prime Minister, giving different messages to people about what the current situation is. People are saying to me in my community, 'What exactly am I supposed to be doing about vaccination?' because there is no consistent media information campaign running. There are no consistent, reliable, .ads on the TV and so forth. People are uncertain and then they see these mixed messages. Only in the last week, there have been mixed messages about the rollout and about what the new orders of Pfizer vaccines at the end of the year mean for people who are over 50. Then we're told, 'Oh, no, you heard wrong. The media reported wrong.' The amateur hour mixed messaging has a cost and that cost is the increasing hesitancy we are seeing in our communities about taking up the vaccine. We know that getting the mass vaccination of our population is one of the most significant things we can do, not only for our health but also for our economy. When I look over the record of the government—I have to say every now and then I get a notification on my phone saying the COVID app has updated itself—I wonder what the point is and how much was expended on that particular little project?

We really need to step up our game as a federal government in response to the challenges that COVID related health issues continue to put before us. I call on the government—the Prime Minister and the relevant ministers—to do exactly that.

On the economic side, it is a touch bemusing to see speaker after speaker from the government side get up and say, 'We've been so fantastic. JobKeeper was the saviour of jobs and economies in this country,' when we well remember the fact that we were told that it was a ridiculous notion. When Labor was first raising the idea of wage subsidies we were told that it was ludicrous, that there was no way that we were going to be doing anything like that. It was really only when we saw the huge lines outside Centrelink offices, and the government suddenly had a bit of a panic attack and thought that this would be very problematic for them, that we saw the formation of the national gathering of business, government and unions. Full credit to the ACTU, I have to say, who were the real ones who pushed for a wage-subsidy-based program. It was great. At the end of the day, I love a government that learns from its mistakes—

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