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

The Prime Minister is treating us like mugs again. In a few moments, he's going to stand at that dispatch box and say that Australians have to make a choice between hope and holding him to account for the debacle that we find ourselves in. Of course there's hope. Australians are getting vaccinated in record numbers. They're ignoring the lunatic ranting from his mates, like the member for Dawson and Senator Canavan from Queensland. Australians are doing their job, but we cannot ignore that in New South Wales today alone nearly 1,000 people have been infected with this horrible virus. Since the last outbreak, 132 people have died.

Our kids are the forgotten ones. They're shut out of school and locked away from their friends. They're climbing their walls, and they're at the back of the queue when it comes to getting a vaccine. How do I tell my 14-year-old son that his 17-year-old sister can get a vaccine, but he cannot? How do I tell him that? Thousands and thousands of Australians are in exactly the same position.

The Prime Minister wants us to forget how we got here, but we simply are not going to do that, because if we forget how we got here we will make the same mistakes again. He didn't hold a hose, he didn't sign a contract and he ignored the fact that the virus was bleeding out of hotel quarantine and leading us to the situation we're in today. (Time expired)