Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

The Morrison government had two jobs and it has failed at them both. It had the job of getting quarantine right. It is a constitutional responsibility of the Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth has ducked that responsibility from the get-go in this pandemic. The other job that it has failed to get right is the vaccine rollout. But right here and now I'm going to speak about quarantine, because the exemption of this project from the ordinary requirements of this parliament and the ordinary requirements that it go before the Public Works Committee is only needed because the Morrison government failed to get onto this last year. We've known for 12 months that hotel quarantine is grossly inadequate, that hotel quarantine is a temporary fix, that hotel quarantine is not the perfect solution—far from it; hotel quarantine is not even an adequate solution.

We've had 24 outbreaks from hotel quarantine. Think about that: 24 outbreaks, each of them capable of giving rise to a massive spread of this deadly disease across our country. It's only good luck, good management by state premiers and the immensely cooperative behaviour of Australians that has prevented those 24 outbreaks from the inadequate hotel quarantine arrangements that we have and has saved us from the recurrence of the deaths that we had across our country, particularly in aged care, in the middle of last year.

The government commissioned a report from an eminent former secretary of the Commonwealth health department to tell the Commonwealth government what needed to be done for quarantine in Australia. And what did we get? We got a report from this eminent former secretary of the Commonwealth department of health that told the Commonwealth of Australia that they needed to build dedicated quarantine facilities. It's not like this is a new idea for the Commonwealth of Australia. Australians in every capital city are deeply familiar with the Commonwealth-run facilities, which are now museums—think North Head in Sydney or Point Nepean in Victoria—where the Commonwealth used to have its own dedicated facilities for infectious diseases. It doesn't now because we've resolved other arrangements to deal with infectious diseases, but this pandemic is presenting us with a challenge that the Morrison government has utterly failed to meet. It's continuing to fail to meet this challenge. It thumbed its nose at Victoria's proposals when they were first made.

We still don't have exactly clear what it is the Commonwealth wants to do. It took months to get to the position that it's announcing here today, and that is that it wants to go ahead with a joint venture with Victoria to build a dedicated quarantine facility in Victoria. It should have been doing this last October. We've known since last October, when the report that it commissioned was delivered to the Commonwealth government, that a Howard Springs style facility is what is required. There hasn't been a single escape of this deadly virus from Howard Springs. There hasn't been an outbreak from Howard Springs. There has been an outbreak from every part of the hotel quarantine system. Victoria had to go back into lockdown because of someone leaving hotel quarantine in South Australia and spreading the virus throughout Melbourne, which happily, again, we've managed to get on to. But it's a disgrace. It is a disgrace that the Morrison government has squibbed its responsibilities, ducked its responsibilities, run away from its responsibilities. You've only got to think about the disgraceful performance of the Prime Minister going right back to the bushfires. 'I don't hold a hose, mate'—that is Scott Morrison. 'I don't hold a hose, mate,' and he's at it again.

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