Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Cabinet—the assistant minister representing a Prime Minister whose incompetence, lack of empathy and obsession with political marketing over policy substance is hurting Australians. Last year the Prime Minister presided over Australia's first recession in nearly 30 years. This was a recession made worse than it had to be by the policy failures of the Morrison government. This year the Prime Minister is repeating the mistakes of the past. He's mismanaging the response to COVID, bungling the vaccine rollout and bungling the need for quarantine facilities. That mismanagement is delaying Australia's economic recovery. It is squandering the opportunity to build back a better Australia after last year's economic and health crisis.

Prime Minister Morrison is failing the Australian people. The first fundamental failure of Prime Minister Morrison is that he refuses to take responsibility. The federal government is responsible for international quarantine—it's there in the Constitution—but Prime Minister Morrison has refused to do his job and implement federal quarantine facilities. Instead, he handballed the hotel system to the states and then blamed everyone else when things went awry. The federal government is responsible for aged-care regulation, but, when COVID-19 hit elderly Australians in nursing homes, Prime Minister Morrison blamed everyone else: he blamed the states; he blamed the aged-care workforce; he even blamed the families. Australians know a blame-shifter when they see one: never doing his job, never taking responsibility, never holding a hose and always finding someone else to blame for his own incompetence and carelessness.

The second fundamental failing of this Prime Minister is that's he's all announcement and no follow-up. He makes plenty of big announcements to get the headlines, but, once the media caravan has moved on, he fails to deliver. He junks the promises made to the Australian people and moves on to the next flashy announcement and piece of marketing spin. He is all talk, no action: no follow-through and no delivery. He is a shyster and a conman whose broken promises left Australians worse off. Before the 2019—

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