House debates

Tuesday, 1 June 2021

Matters of Public Importance

COVID-19: Vaccination

3:20 pm

Photo of Mark ButlerMark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives) Share this | Hansard source

Today is an important day to reflect on where the nation is at in relation to the vaccine rollout. Yesterday we reached 100 days of the vaccine rollout, and today is the first day of winter. As we know, any illness around the respiratory system is a particular risk in winter. That, of course, is why phase 1a was decided upon by the government and why the opposition and bodies around the country gave it support.

So where are we, 100 days into the rollout? Well, we're still not in the top 100 nations of the world in terms of doses per head of population. We're still at around two per cent of the Australian population having been fully vaccinated, and, tragically, we have seen this dreaded virus reach back into the aged-care system in Victoria. So—in spite of the Prime Minister's attempts, repeatedly, to pat himself on the back over the course of this question time—we are not performing well.

Phase 1a was announced in January for the priority populations: frontline workers in border and quarantine and in the hospital system, and, importantly, from the Commonwealth's perspective, aged-care and disability-care facility residents and the 318,000 workers caring for them. There was good reason why those populations were prioritised, particularly those living in residential aged and disability care. They are, we know, the most vulnerable to succumbing to this virus. We know this from overseas experience and we know it through our own bitter and tragic experience last year, in New South Wales and, significantly, in Victoria as well. So that is why those were prioritised, and the government promised to vaccinate those populations fully by Easter. The minister said it would be a six-week process; it would be done by Easter; we could then move on to the older populations in the community, to make sure that, by the time the first day of winter arrived—which is today—all of our very vulnerable populations in residential care and older Australians in the community would be fully protected.

The Prime Minister was asked again—he just can't back down; he just can't admit he was wrong—by the Leader of the Opposition in question time today: 'Do you still think that this is not a race?' And he tried to blame the secretary of the department. He is always trying to blame someone else. Well, since that answer, the secretary of the department has been asked in estimates about his comments about whether or not this is a race, and Brendan Murphy's testimony to Senate estimates, over the last very little while, was that he was talking about the approval processes for the vaccine by the TGA. We all agree that that was not a race and that Australia should not follow the emergency approval process followed in those countries that were succumbing to very serious rates of infection, like the US, the UK and Europe. We all agreed with that. So the Prime Minister was again just trying to deflect to the secretary of the department, who said he was not talking about the vaccine rollout; he was talking about the vaccine approval process by the TGA.

There are three areas of very, very concerning outcomes from the government. The first, obviously, is that there are incredibly poor vaccination rates for aged-care residents—and we're not even getting to disabilities; we're going to have to get to them at some stage. There are very poor rates of vaccination for aged-care residents, who were all promised full vaccination by Easter.

We've talked about the two doses question a number of times. The government's own health website confirms that, in relation to Pfizer and AstraZeneca, you need two doses for full protection, and that full protection only emerges some days after the second dose. We've been told by the government's own information today that 587 facilities in aged care still haven't received their second dose and 21 facilities across the country haven't received a single dose at all. In Victoria, the epicentre of this latest outbreak, there are 13,000 residents of aged-care facilities who have only received a single dose of this vaccine.

I asked the minister again why he told viewers of 7.30 that the vaccination process in aged care would be completed by last Friday. He wasn't asked when the first doses would be complete; he was asked when the vaccinations would be completed. I've read the transcript since the minister's answer. He wasn't asked by Leigh Sales: 'When will the first doses be done?' He was asked: 'When will aged care be vaccinated?' He said it was 99 per cent completed and would be 100 per cent completed on Friday. When we asked him about the one dose, two dose question he pushed back and said, 'You know, one dose is essential.' I think we understand that one dose is essential in a two-dose process. It's a pretty important stopping point on your way to full vaccination. But we should not pretend that one dose gives full protection. We should not. The minister keeps pushing up to the press gallery old research about the effectiveness of a single dose in relation to the original strain of this virus, when we know that Public Health England published last week through the British Medical Journal research that showed that a first dose of Pfizer or a first dose of AstraZeneca was only 33 per cent effective against what we now call the delta strain.

I'm not raising this to be cute. I'm raising it because the community needs to know about the level of protection provided through a single dose and the importance of getting a second dose. It is the government that is seeking to evade a serious question about whether or not it has complied with its responsibility to fully protect the most vulnerable members of our community before we move into winter, given that we are continuing to experience an outbreak from hotel quarantine every single week or two.

The other fall down is with staff. These people are heroes. For some of the lowest rates of pay in our community they have kept us safe. They were on the front line last year and in Victoria they are on the front line again, and the government promised they would be fully vaccinated by Easter. We've tried by hook and by crook to get an answer from the government about how many aged-care workers have been vaccinated. Today they said there were 33,000 or so. There are probably more than 200,000 workers in aged care. They conducted a survey of aged-care providers that found that less than nine per cent of the providers they surveyed were confident that their aged-care workers were fully protected. This is just not good enough. When it became clear that the inreach process to vaccinate residents was going to be complicated for staff the Commonwealth just gave up. They said, 'Go to your GPs. Go and find a state clinic. Go to a GP respiratory clinic.' Later on, the government said, I think to the COVID committee, 'We'll have 13 pop-up clinics running by the end of May'. The end of May was yesterday. They've got three clinics. All three are in Sydney. The minister said they'd be established soon in Victoria. After the minister said that, the department was asked about the pop-up clinics, and they said there are still no locations identified for the remaining 10 clinics and no arrangements had been agreed with particular state providers. Then they said they would provide a tender for companies to go into aged-care facilities—hopefully, having vaccinated their residents—and vaccinate the staff. The tender is out, but it doesn't close until 30 June. It's running for another four weeks. That's the other option the government has provided, a tender process that doesn't finish until almost the middle of winter. It is just not good enough.

The government decided on 30 November to just stop the support programs that would prevent aged-care workers from having to work across two or more facilities just to make ends meet, just to keep their household budgets going. They'd say, 'Well, when a hotspot is declared will put that arrangement in place again.' It's too late then. What we've seen in Victoria because aged-care workers have had to work across different facilities is that five facilities now are impacted by this.

This has been a debacle, and tragically it is now playing out again in a state that suffered so much last year. Again, we have a Prime Minister who cannot take responsibility, is genetically incapable of facing up to his responsibilities and his failures. I don't think anyone expected from the minister for aged care services a better answer than he gave today. He's just not up to it. He said last week he's very comfortable with the pace of the rollout in aged care and, when questioned about that again today, he stood by it. He couldn't answer a simple question of whether or not the Commonwealth is responsible for aged care. It so unambiguously is. The Prime Minister tries to blame everyone else. The Australian people, particularly those with loved ones in aged care, just want him to admit that he's got this wrong, he's underperformed and he's going to fix it. When is the Prime Minister going to do that simple thing?

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