Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] My community, like communities across our nation, is in lockdown today because of the Prime Minister's stubborn insistence that the vaccine rollout was not a race, because of the Prime Minister's failure to listen to calls last year to obtain more, and more types of, vaccines, because of the Prime Minister's failure to start this year with any of the necessary sense of urgency to get the vaccine into arms, until delta gave him no choice, and because of the Prime Minister's refusal, over 18 months of this pandemic, to set up a national, safe quarantine system. We're in lockdown because of the attitude the Prime Minister took to the two main jobs he had this year—the vaccine rollout and national quarantine—which is the same one he took to last year's devastating bushfires: 'I don't hold the hose, mate.' How can it be that we are last in the developed world when it comes to having our population fully vaccinated? It's simply not good enough.

Every day, members of my community do everything they can to contribute to the public health response. They have sacrificed: they have juggled working from home with helping their children with remote learning. They have worked on the front line as health professionals and carers, and as cleaners, childcare workers and disability support workers, for the benefit of others and at risk to themselves. They have lost their jobs and they have missed weddings and funerals, birthdays and anniversaries. We have missed our families and our friends deeply, and we still do. The Prime Minister might want to deny the impacts of his failures on Australians, but we're not going to forget them easily.