Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My community is entering its sixth week of lockdown and is about to have many more because of the actions of this government, in particular the actions of this 'off to the footy; don't hold a hose' Prime Minister. There has been poor vaccine procurement, a poor approach to hotel quarantine, a lack of foresight, a lack of insight and a lack of action. The laissez-faire policies of this government are causing my community enormous harm. Very poor messaging about vaccines has contributed to our low vaccine rates. It's contributing to the lack of business activity. It's contributing to the financial impacts. It's contributing a whole lot to my community and the community of south-west Sydney and how it's coping compared to the rest of Sydney and the rest of New South Wales.

This Prime Minister is opaque in his actions. He won't release the modelling from the Doherty Institute about the way out of the pandemic. He won't release information about why the vaccines were procured in the way they were, why we don't have enough of the Messenger RNA vaccines and why he won't approach hotel quarantine in any rational way, which we know doesn't work and leaks and will continue to leak until something is done about it. We need proper quarantine near each capital city. We need proper vaccination of our population and proper messaging—(Time expired)