Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I find it so interesting when the Prime Minister says in question time that Labor is trying to politicise a pandemic. We are not. What we are doing is protecting the Australian people from this inept government—a government that is so laissez-faire about everything it can't be bothered to order enough vaccines, it can't be bothered to build quarantine facilities and it can't be bothered to efficiently and properly support Australian business and Australian workers who, let me guarantee you, are still hurting as a result of what they've been going through for now well over 14 months. It is really an abomination that this government would stand here and pride itself on what a brilliant job it is doing. Let me tell you: the brilliant job has been done by the people of Australia and by the premiers of Australia. The Prime Minister has been lacking through this pandemic and is still lacking as we speak.

My electorate of Paterson has an incredibly strong tourism sector. People come from all over New South Wales—although, they are not coming from Sydney right now, because, as the Premier of New South Wales has said, this has not been handled well by the Commonwealth, and she meant vaccines and quarantine—in particular to see the magnificent whales on the whale highway as they make their way up north for the migratory season to have their young. People come from all over the world normally as well—but, of course, at the moment they can't. Due to COVID restrictions, my tourism operators, my whale-watch operators, have had to take boats—with a capacity normally of about 130 people—out with as few people as 13. They've survived due to JobKeeper. But, with that finishing up, I struggle to see how they can continue without more job losses—without staff losing their jobs.

It's really easy to become complacent when the country has a low number of cases. It's easy for the Prime Minister to boast, 'It's not a race.' Of course it's a race. It's a race to get people vaccinated, to save lives, to save livelihoods, to save our country from becoming a pariah and an outlier in a very global world. Just today the Premier of New South Wales came out and stated:

We don't have any control over the number of doses we receive and what those doses are. That is the responsibility of the Commonwealth.

They are just the facts. Everyone else gets it, the Liberal premiers get it, but the Prime Minister and his band of, frankly, incompetent ministers continue to fail to take any responsibility.

In my electorate, a GP clinic was getting prepared for the vaccination rollout. They rented the premises next door, knocked out a wall and bought new vaccine fridges in the belief that they'd need the space to house incoming vaccines. But those fridges never filled up. The vaccines did not come as they were needed and the jabs haven't gone into the arms, because of the Morrison government. In the month since February, New South Wales has seen under two million doses administered. That may seem like a lot, but the reality is that only 243,000 people have been fully vaccinated in Australia. Let me repeat that: as of today, only 243,000 people have been fully vaccinated in Australia. It is not good enough. That is under three per cent of the state's population—just three per cent. Comparatively, the US and the UK have managed to vaccinate just under half of their population. So, in the global race, to get people vaccinated, we have well and truly fallen behind. If this government continues with this failure of a rollout, our businesses won't be able to compete, our tourism sector will choke and our economy will suffer until 2023. Australians just simply can't afford this, on top of the debt that has been loaded onto them by this government.

To compound the issue, in the past couple of weeks, people in my electorate and across Australia have been bombarded by misinformation from the likes of Clive Palmer. Well, let me say this: if the Prime Minister were half the ad man he makes out to be, he'd do better than Clive Palmer.

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