Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week my office has been inundated with calls from disappointed and frustrated Novocastrians who were notified that their Pfizer vaccine appointment had been cancelled in order to redirect supplies to Sydney. Today that disappointment has turned to white-hot anger with the news that the PM has miraculously found 165,000 Pfizer vaccines to replenish our stocks—but it's way too late to prevent Newcastle from going into another snap lockdown at 5 pm today.

This morning I called on the Prime Minister to tell the people of Newcastle just how long he'd been sitting on this secret stash of Pfizer, while watching our region being robbed of precious vaccines and leaving us all like sitting ducks, vulnerable and unprotected. He's talking big now, demanding that the New South Wales Premier return all the stolen vaccines from the regions, but, seriously, who could trust this Prime Minister? This man has failed on every count to implement a timely and effective vaccination scheme.

Novocastrians like educator Catherine Adams-Nash from Jesmond have been waiting in lines for months for vaccines, way before the New South Wales outbreak. The barriers she's faced would put an Olympics hurdles race to shame. Catherine nailed it when she said: 'It's on account of the federal government's failures that this entire process has been a farce, not to mention that the state government would not have had to make this decision had sufficient vaccines been provided by the Morrison government in the first instance.' Catherine's right. This Prime Minister said it was not a race, and he was wrong.