Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's easy to see that the Deputy Prime Minister's heart to heart with the member for Dawson has hit the point. Here he is standing in this place again today spreading his dangerous falsehoods, and we know how they end up. They end up with riots on the streets in Sydney and Melbourne and they end up with coppers in hospital. That's the end result of this sort of rubbish and nonsense. If these people can't agree amongst themselves, how the hell are they supposed to lead us out of the situation that we're in today?

Last week the New South Wales government announced that the Shellharbour local government area would no longer be classified as part of Sydney. We welcome that. It means that restrictions can be eased on the basis of health risks within our community, not because we are stapled to Greater Sydney. The decision to keep Wollongong tied to Sydney, however, is crazy. It assumes, bizarrely, that Wollongong has got weaker links with Shellharbour and stronger links to Sydney, which is 90 kilometres away. This is not the case. The police area command which services most of Wollongong is in Shellharbour. The mass vaccination centre and the major hospital in Wollongong service Shellharbour. So it's time for the New South Wales government to end this crazy mess, put our regions back together again and enable us to get on with fighting this terrible virus.