Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister had committed to four million vaccinations by the time JobKeeper is cut. The Prime Minister is running nearly four million vaccinations short of his own target. Why is the Prime Minister so quick to rip away JobKeeper but so slow to roll out vaccines?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I pre-empted the Leader of the Opposition's question in my last answer when I made it fairly clear that the Leader of the Opposition and the Labor Party speak out of both sides of their face when it comes to the government's response to the pandemic. On the one side, they pretend to support these measures, whether it's JobKeeper or the vaccination program—the unprecedented support which has ensured that we've stood by Australians—and on the same hand, they talk out the other side of their mouth, seeking to undermine the very things that have ensured that this country has led the world in both our economic and our health response.

When it comes to vaccination, it may be a mystery to the Leader of the Opposition that, of the 3.8 million vaccines we've contracted from overseas, 700,000 were able to be provided because of the desperately serious situation that we find in Europe. But, regardless of that point, we said back in February that we would be hitting around 80,000 a week in the early weeks. Well, we've already hit that mark in the early weeks. We already advised, back in February, that the four million task would not be hit because of the disruption in supply that occurred, and that target would be pushed back. The Leader of the Opposition seems to think that we are living in a pandemic that does not have uncertainties. If the Leader of the Opposition had been sitting in my chair during this crisis, Australians would be despairing, because he would not have had the ability to pull together the response that this government has. I'm happy for the Minister for Health to add further to this answer.

But the vaccination program will continue to roll out. It will reach all Australians with the first dose by the end of October, and every single day we will work hard to deliver that vaccination program, despite the undermining by a leader of the opposition who even seeks to play politics with the pandemic.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday there were over 18,000 vaccinations in Australia. Next week, we move to the following phase, when the supply from Australia's domestic, sovereign manufacturing comes on board. That phase will see us receiving approximately a million vaccines a week. It will allow us to move to some hundreds of thousands of vaccinations a week as we build up—up to over a thousand GPs in the first part of that and then ultimately to 4,000 general practitioners.

And, yes, it's been based on supply. When the international situation saw a collapse, we made sure that we had sovereign vaccine manufacturing, and that's what's protected Australia. They can pretend it didn't occur overseas; we're upfront about that. But we pre-empted, we protected and we prepared. (Time expired)