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

As I stand here today, only 3.1 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated. We have a complete lack, in terms of a public health campaign, and we are still using hotels for quarantine, rather than purpose built facilities. And where has our Prime Minister been this week? The member for Cook has been on a secret cooks tour of the mother country. There he has been, doing his own SBS Who Do You Think You Are? episode all by himself in the UK, while in three major cities in Australia we are fighting new outbreaks of COVID. This is an appalling record.

On top of that, in this vacuum of a COVID response, Clive Palmer is out letterboxing electorates across this country with a scare campaign around the vaccine. Clive Palmer is disrespecting locals in my community—he is—in the winter in Melbourne. Last winter, in my electorate, 472 locals contracted COVID and we lost 67 people in aged care in my community. Clive Palmer, you are disgusting. How you could put this in letterboxes in my community is beyond belief. I want to call on people who live in my electorate today: please, reject this man's rubbish and join me in demanding that this Prime Minister get us out of this COVID mess.