House debates

Wednesday, 2 June 2021

Statements by Members

COVID-19: Vaccination

4:20 pm

Photo of Josh WilsonJosh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | | Hansard source

The vaccine rollout has been a shambles. Despite more than a year to prepare, despite favourable health circumstances that have not put our health system under the kind of pressure experienced in other countries, the Morrison government's vaccine rollout has been a creeping, fumbling, scattergun bunglefest. Not even 10 per cent of aged-care workers have been vaccinated, and less than two per cent of people living in residential disability care have been vaccinated. Across the population as a whole, barely two per cent have been vaccinated. While in America, whose health system has been hammered, they're at 50 per cent already. This failure, this basic administrative incompetence, means more frequent outbreaks and more harmful outbreaks, with impacts on people's physical and mental health and on business and on workers. It's not going to get better as long as the government puts all its energy into bare-faced denial. It's the opposite of responsible government to respond to missing all your targets by simply getting rid of the targets you set in the first place.

We need to get Australia vaccinated. It is the key to our recovery. It will make us safer from the serious risk that remains; it will help Australians return home; and it will mean, in due course, that we can open up for people to go to and from Australia. I know there are people with unwell relatives or with newborn children or who are separated from kids through relationship breakdown who desperately want to see one another. But that will not happen while the Morrison government continues, unapologetically, irresponsibly, to make a heartbreaking mess of Australia's vaccine rollout.