Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] My apologies for my croaky voice; I am recovering from a cold. But do not fear; I've been tested, as is the practice these days. If you've got flu-like symptoms, get tested. On the day that I was tested in Victoria, last Wednesday, there were almost 50,000 people in Victoria who did the same thing: they got tested, making sure that they did not have COVID, making sure that they were not passing it on to their loved ones or to their work colleagues or to people [inaudible]. In Victoria, they've come a long way, and the Victorian government and Bendigo Health are doing their job. On this day, test results were back to everybody—99.1 per cent; a bit of a gold standard, I'd say—and available the next day. I got mine about 27 hours after I was tested, and I know this to be true of almost everyone who's been going through the Bendigo Health facility, due to their work and their support.

My little children also had to be tested. You know the nature of toddlers: if they've got a cold, you've got a cold. I've now discovered what it means to be a childcare parent and the Petri dishes that our childcare centres are. It is a testing time for a lot of our childcare educators and our families, with what's going on in this current lockdown.

I raise these figures because they speak to the modern life we're living at the moment. It was not just in 2020; now, in 2021, the moment you have a sore throat or a cold, you do go out and get tested, to make sure that you don't have COVID-19.

It's not just the testing that is critical. We're also at the stage where it's about vaccines. Bendigo Health, as has been remarked in this place, has been doing a very good job at getting jabs into arms. There's a willing community, willing to get vaccinated. A few weeks ago, Bendigo topped the charts of the nation by having the most first jabs in arms. We'd be well on our way to being fully vaccinated, but we had such a high uptake of AstraZeneca, and, as you know, with AstraZeneca there is a three-month lag with getting fully vaccinated.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that we're doing well in terms of vaccinations. Bendigo and this region have a very high vaccination rate for one-year-olds. It's what we do as parents; it's what we've always done—we make sure that our kids are vaccinated. What has been said to me, as to why we don't have more people vaccinated, is that that is for two reasons: (1) lack of supply, and that's on the Prime Minister; and (2) making it easy. That is where Bendigo Health is doing a good job. It's making it as easy as possible. One of the reasons for our success is the fact that they had and continue to have a very simple model of how to get vaccinated, although mixed messaging from the government is hurting.

The other reason we're doing well is that we have fantastic local media. We still have strong local media in our region who've made the message clear to people on how to get vaccinated, where to get vaccinated and who can get vaccinated. I think our journalists locally were some of the most excited under-40-year-olds to learn this week and last week that they are now eligible to get vaccinated, and I think that they were the first in the queue.

There have also been great partnerships with local businesses, like DON KR, which is our biggest employer in the region, partnering with Bendigo Health to make sure that all of their workers were vaccinated on site. They've informed me that, at the end of this month, next week, they will hit a vaccination rate of over 85 per cent for their workers. So people have been at work and been able to get vaccinated—double dosed. It's a remarkable effort but a demonstration of what can be done when we work together.

In the final few seconds that I have, I truly do call on the Prime Minister to park the politics and speed up the supply, and to really encourage and foster these partnerships at the local grassroots level. Think about incentives to encourage those who aren't sure, who've been busy or who haven't yet been able to get online and book in. Vaccination rates are the end to our lockdown. From our Prime Minister we need leadership, to ensure that more people are getting vaccinated. I believe Australia can get to the same vaccination rate as we have for one-year-olds—a rate of 95 per cent—but only with strong leadership from the top and from the federal level.