Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The people of Lalor today will be quite confused by the budget delivered last night, and they will be so for many reasons. Firstly, they will be confused as to why there was no announcement about a national quarantine facility. They will be very confused about that, particularly the South Asian community that I represent. There is a four-year-old Australian citizen local to my community stuck in India right now with no chance of coming home at this stage. My community were expecting that the federal government would, in this budget, finally take responsibility for quarantine facilities in this country to see us through COVID. Instead, what we saw from the government was no announcements around quarantine facilities, with not a single cent to go there, but we did see they are expecting the borders to stay closed until December. We know that the vaccine rollout is going much slower than was promised by this government, so it's not surprising that people will find all of this confusing.

Equally confusing is that, today, the government wants to talk about the future as if the pandemic is over when in Melbourne today we know it isn't over. The Victorians in this parliament have been checking exposure sites today and yesterday. The pandemic is far from over. The federal government has failed in this budget to deliver the safety that Australians require.