Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I want to start off by thanking the parliament, the Speaker and the people who have made it possible for those of us who are with our communities during their time of need to still participate in this debate and, indeed, in the proceedings of parliament. It is truly an amazing thing that could not have been done that long ago.

Indeed, I come from a community that delivered so much not that long ago, over Christmas and New Year. While we were locked down or, as the people of Mackellar and the northern beaches prefer to think of it, while we kept people locked out, we were able to do so much to keep the rest of Australia free. That means we were able to keep kids at school, people at work, families together and good businesses in business. Now we are facing yet another great challenge, both here and across the rest of Sydney. There has been only one instance of community transmission of COVID on the northern beaches, and, indeed, in Mosman, North Sydney and so many other parts of Sydney there have been very few instances of community transmission. But we have shared in the pain and we have shared in the sacrifice that so many others need to go through.

I want to thank my community. I want to thank people like Andrew Pearce, the president of Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club, who said, famously, 'Volunteerism is the price we pay for living on this planet,' and Peter Kinsey, who at the young age of 80-something finally started building the Long Reef surf lifesaving clubhouse for which they have waited so many years. He reminds us that it will replace a temporary surf lifesaving club that was built nearly 70 years ago.

Jane and Michelle at Bunnings have made sure that we all have the resources we need to make those improvements around the house. There are people like Monica at Gurtaj Restaurant at Collaroy and David Singer at Frenchies Brasserie, who has kept his restaurant and his business going when so many others have walked away. There are people like Cindy at Taste Espresso and Robert McIndoe at Sloppy Tee's, who, when this pandemic first happened, gave the shifts that his wife usually does during the week to other staff because they needed the money more than she did. I don't know how that went down at home, but it certainly worked well at work!

The fact of the matter remains that when my community was asked to give more, we did. When the people of south-west Sydney needed more vaccines, our workers, our tradies, our retirees and our children, especially those doing the HSC, gave up their vaccines to that the people in south-west Sydney could be vaccinated because they came from a hotspot. These are the sacrifices that we have made in order to ensure that we not only live in a country that will one day be free from this virus—or at least be able to live with this virus and be free—but that all of us have a sense of sacrifice. When we locked down over Christmas and New Year, this sacrifice was critical to ensure that so many other people right around the country were able to enjoy their Christmases without being separated from their families, while so many families in the area that I represent on the northern beaches found themselves separated.

We do not ask for equivalency. We simply want people to know that we happily make these sacrifices. We gave up these vaccines. We ensured that, when there was an area of concern at Woolworths in Glenrose, in the southern suburb of Belrose, we didn't have 50 per cent or indeed 75 per cent of people getting tested; everyone got tested. Indeed, some people got tested twice, so much so that the testing rate in Belrose is 107 per cent. At one point, there were so many people getting tested in Belrose that it was equivalent to the rest of the state combined. These are the sacrifices we made and they're the ones we'll continue to make.