Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I mean, honestly! Short-term scheduling issues? They dropped their entire targets for the whole rollout. They had targets and they dropped them. Now they're calling them short-term scheduling issues. It is so frustrating to listen to a government where their hubris doesn't match their output. Their hubris is at an all-time high. These people are patting themselves on the back at every opportunity that they possibly can, but they're not doing the work. They're not actually making sure that Australians are being vaccinated.

Let's go back to the very beginning, shall we? Let's go back to the beginning where the Minister for Health did all of these quite colourful and flowery press conferences saying how Australians are going to be at the head of the queue. The eagle has landed—the three-word-slogan press conferences from this Minister for Health. He even put Liberal Party branding on an announcement for securing Pfizer vaccines—not Australian government branding: Liberal Party branding. These people wanted all the credit, but they weren't willing to do the actual work.

When this rollout started happening, all of a sudden the targets that this government was meant to achieve seemed completely unachievable and were completely missed. They said there would be four million vaccines by the end of March, and they missed that by about three million vaccines. But this government didn't then say: 'Hang on a second. Let's try and fix this. Let's try and get this into the right place. We need it to work. We set these targets for a reason. We set them so that when we go into winter we don't have aged-care facilities completely void of vaccines.' Instead, what did we hear? They said, 'No, we're going to have all vaccines done by October.' Then the Prime Minister said, 'No, no, no—I only meant one vaccine by October.' Then the Prime Minister said, 'No, no, no—when I said one vaccine by October, I meant by the end of the year.' Then he said: 'No, no, no—not by the end of the year. Forget targets. We don't do targets for the vaccine rollout.' There couldn't have been a bigger walkback from where they started.

The tragic thing is that aged-care facilities in Victoria are in lockdown right now because, instead of fixing their rollout to meet their targets, they just got rid of their targets altogether. Instead of fixing the rollout to make sure that aged-care residents were protected, they just got rid of their targets altogether. Instead of fixing the rollout to make sure that the disability care sector was protected, they dropped their targets altogether. Instead of making sure that their targets were met so that immunocompromised Australians were protected, what did they do? They dropped their targets altogether. They have not organised the vaccines in order to meet their own targets. They were willing to put Liberal Party branding on announcements, but they're not willing to put any level of government responsibility around the failure of this vaccine rollout. And now we are here where we are in Victoria, in lockdown and in a situation where vulnerable Victorians are exposed and vulnerable to this virus. You would think that the federal government would have an ounce of humility—an ounce of self-awareness—that, maybe, the federally run vaccine program should somehow be the responsibility of the federal government, but they haven't. The health minister comes in here and says that it's all going well and that it's going along as planned, even though they don't have targets for their own rollout.

I've been in contact in the last 24 hours with one of the aged-care facilities in my own electorate which is locked down because the staff are working across multiple facilities. The CEO was completely infuriated by the fact that, when these staff at our aged-care facilities were told by the federal government that they needed to go and source their own vaccines instead of the federal government including them in the priority groups that they said they would originally, now we have a situation in which staff are working across two facilities—the federal government haven't fixed that—and they're told that they have to go and source their vaccines, just like any other member of society. This is the federal government's fault, this is their vaccine rollout, these are their failures, this is them removing all targets, and this is Australians paying the price. This is Victorians and the Victorian economy paying the price because of the government's failures, the government's inability to take any responsibility and this health minister's hubris that is not meeting the output that Australians need and Victorians rely on.

See this speech in context