Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services (Senator Colbeck) to questions without notice asked by Senators Gallagher and Walsh today relating to COVID-19 vaccination.

We've been asking for information which I understand the minister just tabled at the end of question time. We've been after this information since Monday. The Senate actually passed an OPD to require the minister to table it, which was not followed, and then we had a series of letters, and now it has been tabled. Obviously we will have to take our time to read this, but I would hope that this information is the information that we were seeking and hasn't been modified by the government in any way at all. We will take our time to have a look at that.

I note that our focus on the vaccine has been around the commitments the government has given and then failed to meet, so this is an important document to make sure that we are getting the amount of vaccine supplied, particularly over the winter months, to ensure that everybody who needs to be vaccinated is vaccinated. We already know there are still people in category 1a who remain unvaccinated and there are still people in category 1b who remain unvaccinated because the Commonwealth has failed to roll out this vaccine program efficiently and effectively.

I have no idea why the government decided to hold so much back and ensure that they were responsible for rolling it out, because it's clear the states and territories have the infrastructure and ability to roll out the vaccine in a much more efficient way than the Commonwealth has been proven to do. This has meant that particularly vulnerable groups—people who live in residential aged care, people who receive home care packages, people in disability group homes, those staff who work in those homes, the families who visit people who live in those homes—are now exposed to much more significant risk from the outbreaks that will come across the country because of a number of failures—not just the vaccination failure but the failure to put in place a national quarantine system that allows travelling Australians to quarantine safely and not pass the virus on; we've had a number of outbreaks from quarantine.

Our concern has been the failure of the Commonwealth to meet its own targets. Remember, these targets were not set by anyone but the government itself. The government went out and said: 'We will vaccinate four million by the end of March. We will fully vaccinate all Australians—two shots—by the end of October. We will do residential aged care and the workers who work in it in six weeks, by Easter. There will be six million Australians vaccinated by early May.' None of that has been met. None of it. None of those targets the government set itself have been met.

Now they've brought in military leadership essentially to take the responsibility away from the Department of Health. The Department of Health, who have been guiding this in the pandemic, have basically been told to stand aside and let Lieutenant General Frewen take over even strategic communications. We've seen a very diminished role for Health because the Commonwealth failed to plan and execute a rollout strategy that kept Australians safe—particularly vulnerable Australians, older Australians, Australians living in aged care, workers in those sectors and people over the age of 50. All the data from serious outbreaks overseas shows that these are the groups that need to be protected.

This is the vulnerability we face going into winter. The hospitals in Australia are already full, and they're not even at their busiest point in time yet. I think hospital activity peaks in September. We can only hope that as many people as possible roll up their sleeves and get the vaccine in the next three months. We must hope the government numbers, if they are to be believed, actually do get supply to the states and territories so that they can run the program and so that we reduce some of the risks that Australians face going into this winter period. I imagine this is an extremely scary time for many Australians who are hoping not to catch COVID, hoping to be kept safe and hoping to get a vaccine.

These are important numbers. I hope the government has released everything that they've provided to the states and territories. We will look at these closely, because transparency is key to holding the government to account to deliver for Australians when it comes to the vaccine rollout.