Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The motion before the chamber does one thing. It simply asks Minister Colbeck to do what he said he would do. It's pretty simple. In question time the minister was asked a question by Senator Sterle. He was asked directly how many vaccines per week the Commonwealth is going to make available to the states. Senator Sterle asked, 'How many Pfizer doses per week will the Commonwealth guarantee from today until the end of July 2021?' It's pretty simple information. We can only purchase vaccines on a national basis, as a national government. The states don't purchase them. The Commonwealth purchases them. They have to be supplied to the states, so the question from Senator Sterle was: how many per week have you indicated that you'll give the states?

Senator Colbeck actually gave a quite helpful answer. He said:

That information with respect to the number of doses available—of both Pfizer and AstraZeneca—was provided to state and territory premiers as a part of the national cabinet meeting this morning. I am happy to provide that information to the chamber. I will come back to the chamber as soon as possible with that information, because that information hasn't been given to me off the back of the national cabinet meeting this morning.

We know this information exists, because the minister told us it exists. We know the minister can provide it to the Senate, because the minister told us he would provide it to the Senate. The problem is the minister hasn't and he won't. Sometime between question time and 10 to 10 last night, somebody got to the minister and said, 'By the way, we're not going to do that.'

I'll come to the Prime Minister's character in a moment, but this does come to the pattern across the government where information that is available is routinely denied to the Senate. I think, for example, of FOI claims that Senator Patrick and other senators have put in place. Under the freedom of information legislation, information which was denied through the chamber has been provided to the applicant—in this case a senator. That's not actually how this should work.

With the Westminster system—and we have all our political differences—the key way ministers are accountable to the Australian people is through the parliament. People use the media et cetera, but ultimately, as a matter of our democracy, the Westminster system says that I'm accountable to the people of Australia through the parliament. Yet what we have in this government is not even a creeping tendency but a considered strategy to reduce that accountability to this parliament in question time, in questions on notice, in estimates and in orders for the production of documents. They've so reduced the level of accountability that people are going outside of the parliamentary processes in order to get that information, and sometimes they've been successful through litigation. Well, we shouldn't have parliamentarians having to litigate FOI. We shouldn't have Senator Gallagher having to come in here to put a motion to require a minister to do what he undertook to his colleagues and the Senate chamber to do.

The facts are that the government have taken this approach in part because they don't want to be accountable for their failures. Essentially, Mr Morrison had two jobs: quarantine and vaccine. I'll leave the discussion about quarantine to one side. The discussion about the vaccine has been really notable for the way in which the government has dealt with its failures. Does everyone remember that we were going to have four million vaccines by the end of March? Well, obviously that didn't happen. What has occurred as a consequence of that and failures around targets is that the government has simply said: 'Guess what? We're not going to give anybody any targets.' Instead of saying, 'Look, we missed it for these reasons. We're going to be up-front about this. This is what's occurred,' they just stopped saying anything about any targets. We can't get any information from which you might even be able to infer a target. You can't get any information which might actually quantify any accountability. They're so grumpy about the fact that the Prime Minister was proved to have missed a target. The way they're dealing with this is by not providing any information. It's a very paranoid way of running government, I have to say.

I think Australians would actually appreciate the government being much more up-front about the vaccine. I think they did the wrong thing; the Labor Party has been clear about that. We think they put too many eggs in the AstraZeneca basket. We think they failed to make sure the rollout would be managed properly. We've seen Senator Colbeck in here saying the government had to reset, repivot the rollout vaccine. That was before the change of advice last week. We know that the so-called national cabinet was convened yesterday for an emergency meeting to help fix the rollout—of course, everyone was distracted because the National Party were in the middle of a big fight about who was going to be the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

Mr Morrison has effectively given up on targets, because he would prefer not to have one than to miss another one. And now we see this strategy of hiding information from Australians. Senator Colbeck said yesterday during question time that Australians could have confidence in the rollout based on the information provided to the national cabinet. Pause and think about that for a minute. On the basis of information he is now refusing to provide to the Senate, he's telling us all, 'You can have confidence.' Whatever your political views, Australians are entitled to be able to look at the information their government is providing. Australians are entitled to look at the truth, the facts about what is actually happening on the rollout. I don't think it's reasonable just to say: 'You can have confidence. We're looking after it.'

There isn't a lot of confidence in the rollout. I don't say that with any relish. I think that is a problem. I think it's a problem for the economy and for people's sense of confidence in what is occurring. The lack of confidence is not improved by treating people like they're mushrooms. The lack of confidence and the concern are not improved by refusing to give people information. A smoke-and-mirrors approach from a Prime Minister who refuses responsibility and refuse to admit his failures is not the way to deal with this.

I thank those crossbenchers who have indicated support for the motion. I think the Senate should be empowered to do its job. I say to the minister: can you just do what you said you'd do? Just turn up in here, provide the information that you were asked for that you have already provided to the states. You've already provided it to the states. That's the key issue here: he has it, he can provide it and he's refusing to do so. The Senate should hold him to his word.