Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Deputy Prime Minister. Will the Deputy Prime Minister update the House on the importance of the Morrison-Joyce government's national plan in the safe recovery of our regional economies from the COVID-19 pandemic, and is the Deputy Prime Minister aware of any alternative policies?

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. I know that the member for Cowper has been such a champion, especially for the chemist rollout. The member for Cowper has also been a champion in understanding that we have to have a safe plan and we have to be able to make sure that we get this nation back to where it was, returning the liberties and freedoms that people are born with. We know how important that is for things such as the Coffs Harbour bypass.

I was speaking to the member for Cowper and he was noting that the Coffs Harbour bypass will remove 12 sets of traffic lights, take 12,000 cars off the road and have three tunnels. But we can only build that $1.8 billion piece of infrastructure if we have the workers on the site. And the workers can only get on the site if they have a belief that they are safe and have the capacity to go to work without hindrance, which is what we are delivering. And it is not just that, it is not just the big projects; it is also things such as Lanes Bridge at Bowraville, which is only a $1 million project but incredibly important to the people of Bowraville, or the Coramba Road-Azalea Avenue roundabout, which, at $200,000, is an even smaller project but incredibly important to them.

The work the member for Cowper has done in pursuing the purpose of getting pharmacies—921 pharmacies are administering vaccines in regional areas; we've got 2,645 locations in regional areas getting this. And this is having an outcome not only in the member for Cowper's electorate. In Port Macquarie 67 per cent of people have now received at least one inoculation, and in Bellingen, as you head towards the hills towards my electorate, 64.3 per cent have received one inoculation. And that is the case across the country. In Walgett, just up the road from me, 73.7 per cent of people have received one inoculation. In Warren and Parkes it is 76.7 per cent of people and in Goondiwindi it is 73 per cent of people.

The member for Cowper asked if I know of any alternative policies. I don't. I turned on Insiders on the weekend to listen to the shadow minister, the member for Hindmarsh, and his policy for the Labor Party going forward. Do you guys up there know what the answer was? I don't. Does anybody here know what the answer was? I couldn't understand what the answer was—because they have no alternative policy. You'd think that if the member for Hindmarsh, the shadow minister for health, was going on Insiders he would have gone there with a policy to inform the Australian people what would happen under the Labor Party. But it is quite clear: nothing is going to happen under the Labor Party because they have no plan.