Bridget Archer (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The national plan will bring Australia through the COVID-19 pandemic by reopening our economy and ensuring Australians can live with the virus. Will the Prime Minister please inform the House about the importance of sticking to this national plan?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bass for her question. Along with her, I want to thank all Tasmanians for the great job that they've been doing, because they have the highest double-dose rate of vaccination in the country. Tasmania leads the way—I'm sure the member for Braddon is also very excited about that—with 42 per cent double doses, in a state where the level of COVID has been significantly below the more populous states, like New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, and indeed even Queensland. Yet in that state, in Tasmania, they are doing an amazing job in maintaining very high rates of double-dose vaccinations—in fact, the highest rate anywhere in the country.

That is essential to the national plan, because the national plan enables Australia to live with the virus, not live in fear of it. By doing that, we can move all of the country forward together. But we acknowledge that, whether it be in the member's home state of Tasmania, my home state of New South Wales or the Treasurer's home state of Victoria, we're all starting from different places under this national plan but we're all heading to the same location, and that same location, that same destination, that same goal of the national plan is to connect all Australians once again with each other and to connect Australians with the rest of the world.

That plan is about getting children back at school. It's about getting businesses open and ensuring that they can stay open. It is about ensuring that we're getting Australians back the hours in their jobs, in their workplaces. It's about getting planes back in the air. It's about getting tourists back into towns and regions right across this country, from one end to the other, and indeed enabling Australians to travel once again beyond our own shores. That's what the plan is achieving—because we know that the lockdowns are taking a heavy toll on Australians' wellbeing. It's not only on the economic wellbeing of this country but, even more significantly, on the physical wellbeing of Australians, and there is a mental health toll that we know that the lockdowns are imposing on the country. That's why it continues to be so urgent that we move together as part of this national plan.

Vaccinations, of course, are a key part of that plan. I have already responded on the issue of 500,000 additional Pfizer doses secured in our dose-swap arrangement with the government of Singapore. I thank Prime Minister Lee and I thank the minister for health and also the high commissioner, another great Tasmanian in Will Hodgman—our high commissioner up there in Singapore—for putting this arrangement together which starts September off, as we enter it and spring into Spring, with 500,000 doses of additional hope, courtesy of that arrangement which sees our national plan advanced.