Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No.1) 2021-2022, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2021-2022 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022, which provide appropriation from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the annual services of government for 2021-22. I do so as Victorians are again in a lockdown, the fourth lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. The incredible efforts of the Australian people can't be left unremarked, in particular the people of Victoria for their heroic and Herculean efforts in seeing off this pandemic. Ever since this modern plague hit our shores in early 2020, the Australian people have met this scourge head-on. They have made enormous sacrifices, barely imaginable by the public in a democracy and forecasters alike some time ago. It has been quite a remarkable transformation in the way in which people are dealing with the public health menace that we are confronting. It says a lot about the Australian people that, unlike in some other countries, they have adhered to the very onerous restrictions that they have been required to undertake to protect their fellow community members.

Again, on behalf of all of those in this chamber, I thank the people of Australia and Victoria for the sacrifices they have made to keep each other safe, because we know what the consequences are. People can see it by flicking on their television screens at night when a country is not taking appropriate measures to protect its population. Some of the images that you see on television are very, very confronting. So Australians know that they need to take these actions to keep our community safe.

I also think, though, that what our community wants when we've been asked to make these sacrifices—we have asked the Australian people to make sacrifices—is a government that gives them clarity. Where are we going to collectively? We ask collectively as a government through the national cabinet and through each state government for people to stay at home, not to send their children to school, not to attend work. What concerns me very greatly in watching the fourth iteration of this lockdown in Victoria and the apportioning of blame or people seeking to apportion blame—if I were a person in the outer suburbs in Cranbourne, Clyde, Narre Warren South or Hampton Park, I would be watching this and thinking, 'Can someone please tell me what's going on?' Where is the direction? This person is saying this has been done. This person is saying something else should be done.

I am concerned from a federal perspective that the people in Holt, the south-eastern region of Victoria, Victoria generally and Australia don't have a clear sense of direction out of this challenge that we are confronting. We don't know when all of Australia is going to be vaccinated. We know that that is a key to protecting as much of our population as possible, but we don't have established timelines. Unfortunately, I saw something extraordinary today, with an aged-care minister not being able to identify how much of the workforce that he has some measure of responsibility for has been vaccinated. How many of the workers have been vaccinated? They were all supposed to be vaccinated by now.

So I come back to the point. We ask, and the Australian people have delivered to us as policymakers and legislators who have put some of the most onerous restrictions on movement of the public, including a curfew. The very least that our people could have back is a clear sense of direction and responsibility taken for actions. There's nothing more demoralising for a democracy—and you see people losing faith in parliament and in governments—than when a government says it will do something but, when it doesn't hit a target, starts pointing the fingers. Responsibility has to be taken.

Particularly given that I had been speaking to some government members post the challenges of the bushfire, I thought that, through the auspices of a national cabinet, there would be responsibility taken. The Prime Minister would speak to the premiers and the relevant health ministers, and there would be a national effort on the scale that we have seen in the United States, for example, where 50 per cent of the population has been vaccinated, and other countries like the United Kingdom and Israel, where there has been that focused, concentrated effort. America is a very porous, disparate and discombobulated political system. Even in that system they have got a 50 per cent vaccination rate, and yet we are still in the single digits. It may be a matter of conjecture whether it is somewhere between two and four per cent. Perhaps it is more than that now; say, five per cent.

But it shouldn't be this way. Because of the sacrifices that the Australian people made, we had a great a window of opportunity to vaccinate a lot of people. But what really concerned me—what do the people say who are living around Cranbourne and who last year couldn't leave their houses after 8.00 pm in the evening, had to wear masks, couldn't see loved ones, couldn't attend the funerals of loved ones that had passed away and couldn't attend weddings? I think of the number of occasions where I had friends and people that I knew who were having virtual online ceremonies or had to postpone their weddings or who couldn't attend funerals.

The incongruity and the thing that concerns me the most about this is what this government has asked of the Australian people versus what it has given to the Australian people. Have they provided JobSeeker and JobKeeper? Yes. The Labor opposition provided that as a pathway forward. It was taken up by the government. There are flaws. I'm not going to get into microdetail of criticising the government. They did that. But again, particularly with public health experts, we said to the Australian community, 'If you take these measures then the economy opens up.' So the public then say, 'Okay, government, then what do we need to ensure that we will have a standard of living and a certainty in this COVID normal?' That's another thing that I want to take issue with this government about.

I can recall the Prime Minister saying effectively, particularly when he was at odds with the Victorian state government when they were easing out of the first lockdown, 'Get out from underneath the doona—business as usual.' How could it be business as usual? Do you think it's business as usual in the Northern Hemisphere, including in India, as we speak? Do you think that people within India believe that? We have a very large and wonderful diaspora of people from India in Australia. Do they think it's business as usual in India? Do they think it's business as usual here? We're going through the rigours, the torment and the struggle of another lockdown in Victoria. Do you think they got out from underneath the doona, went out and went their own way, with business as usual? It can't be business as usual, and a government that says that it's business as usual and pretends that it can be is not speaking honestly with the Australian people. It can't be. In every discussion that I have—and, I would suggest, in every discussion that other people, including this government, have—it is a COVID-normal. It's not business as usual. It can't be. Every time the government try to intimate that or criticise states that impose measures, they are damaging the national effort to defeat the scourge of this plague, this COVID pandemic, in the first place. It cannot be business as usual. It's the COVID normal. COVID normal doesn't mean that life goes back to what it was. It can't, until we have vaccinations that prove to be effective. We have a portion of the population, but we also don't know, with the different iterations and mutations of this COVID-19 virus, what might happen.

So I think the government has to be straight with the Australian people. It's COVID normal. States have a right to take protective measures to protect their populations when there is an outbreak. It's quite remarkable, I think, that the Prime Minister is quite aware now. In the second lockdown, I'll never forget the Minister for Health and the Treasurer in this place savaging politicians like me, who were representing their constituencies in Victoria, and the Premier for taking measures to protect Australian lives. I will never forget that as long as I stay in this place. I was very heartened, in listening to the health minister speaking yesterday, that he may have learnt a lesson: that it's perhaps not a good idea for the federal government to be attacking the state government when it's taking appropriate public health measures to protect its population.

What that did during that time, I think, is create confusion. When you don't speak with one voice as a government, what happens is that you allow confusion. You allow conspiracy theories. You energise conspiracy theories. We see some of the worst elements of when we look at the growth of right-wing extremism in this country and its connection in some ways with COVID conspiracy theories. When you have a government that's not firm, that passes blame to other levels of government, that doesn't take responsibility and that doesn't give direction, what do you have? You have confusion, fear and a lack of direction, and you create a vacuum, and vacuums will be filled, often by voices of hate, not by voices of reason or voices that want to bring the community together. That is what has been happening. It should be our daily mission to challenge that. The growth and proliferation of right-wing extremism in this country is a cancer. We have dealt with Islamic extremism. We've seen the horrifying consequences of that being unchecked, and we have devoted enormous resources to protecting the Australian community. I have been part of that through my role on the PJCIS. Equally, we must do the same with right-wing extremism.

The danger with that, though, and the reason I raise this in the context of the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, is that some of the things that people say in this government and elsewhere energise some of those right-wing extremist movements, particularly when they dispute the science—the science of the COVID-19 pandemic and the science of climate change. The governments need to speak with one voice when we're asking the community to make a sacrifice to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic. The government needs to remember this, particularly if they try to take cheap shots at state governments for taking measures to keep their borders safe and then retrofit their explanations after those measures have been successful to say, 'We always supported them.' No, they didn't. They didn't support the Premier of Western Australia, and they certainly didn't support the Premier of Victoria when he took the necessary actions to protect the Victorian population from the scourge and the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like I said—I could speak all day, Deputy Speaker Freelander, and I'm sure you're glad that I won't—the issue is that what Australian people deserve is much more clarity from this government about where they're going. I remember watching as Ford, Toyota and Holden left this country and thinking: 'You know what? Australians make things. They make great things. They make great cars. We used to make great washing machines. We used to make a lot more in this country.' I meet a lot of people. You speak about what used to be made in this country and the fact that, for example, there's still a design element of Ford's high-end vehicles in Australia. So, if the government is talking about this once-in-a-generation pandemic, why doesn't it do something like bring motor manufacturing back into this country?

We live in a very uncertain region, but here's one thing that they could do to provide certainty. Whilst this government almost campaigned against electric vehicles at the last election, I would invite the government to have a look at President Biden hopping into an electric Ford 150 pick-up truck, which they said would never happen, and shooting down the runway in the US, which occurred about a week and a half ago. The future of motor vehicle transportation will certainly be in terms of electric vehicles and perhaps hydrogen. They should look at that. If they really want to do something, they should bring them back here. They should get Tesla to actually make cars here. GMH and Ford have said that they will move into the production of electric vehicles. Do it here; come and do it. I invite the Prime Minister: we have plenty of space in Cranbourne West. If they want to build something for the south-eastern region around the Dandenong region, bring car manufacturing back with electric vehicles. I'm quite sure there would be a number of very receptive voices. I know that some of the people that I've spoken to have an appetite for this. Australia is a stable beacon of opportunity for other countries looking to invest into south-eastern Asia on a stable platform.

There's much more I could say. Let me say this to the government: be clear. Give Australian people a pathway out and not just an injection of money that doesn't last the distance and that will fade away. Provide direction, provide certainty, provide accountability, and provide hope. Continue to do that, and we will have a better Australia coming out of this COVID-19 pandemic.

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