Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, let's not forget the photo ops. Remember the photo op with the Prime Minister, with his Australian mask? He didn't wait to get vaccinated. He was quick out of the blocks with the V for victory sign. He had a personal victory. He got a vaccination. What about the other 96 per cent of the Australian population who can't get a vaccination because this government didn't do enough vaccine deals? The Prime Minister can travel overseas. No other Australian can. The Prime Minister can get a vaccination—two vaccinations; he is fully vaccinated—he can travel overseas, he can go and do a bit of sightseeing and he can go and have a pub crawl. You can't even have a pub crawl in Sydney, but this Prime Minister is having a pub crawl in Cornwall, overseas, half a world away. He can go and inspect the graves of his dead relatives, who've been dead for 200 years. I know Australians who can't go to the funerals of their parents and their grandparents who died last week, but this Prime Minister can do that, and of course he gets his own quarantine arrangement where he beams down, Orwellian style, into the parliament. No other Australian can get that.

It is one rule for this government and this Prime Minister and another rule for everyone else. We see it over and over again. We see this complete failure to take responsibility that is, literally, putting Australians' lives at risk and, literally, putting Australians' jobs at risk. That's because this Prime Minister is so belligerent and so stubborn, refusing to take responsibility, and Australians pay the price. It's happening in Brisbane now, it's been happening in Sydney, it's happening in Melbourne and it won't take long, I'm sure, before it starts happening in other states and territories. It is unacceptable. If there is one thing the Australian people want this Prime Minister to do, it is to take responsibility, get us vaccinated and build purpose-built quarantine stations so that we don't have to turn on the news every night to learn about the next breach of hotel quarantine, because there will be more. Jane Halton, the government's own appointee to review the quarantine system, recommended months ago that we have purpose-built quarantine, but that was just another report delivered to this government that is sitting in the bottom drawer. They know what to do. Every expert has told them what to do—get people vaccinated, sign multiple vaccine deals, roll out the vaccine and build purpose-built quarantine stations—but they continue to refuse to do it. As I say, this has consequences. Australians pay the price.

That brings us to this bill, which is about providing financial assistance to some of the victims of this Prime Minister's complete failure to do his job. I'm sure that the Victorians who will receive and have been receiving these payments are grateful for the fact that payments are being made. That is a good thing. It is another example of something that Labor had to drag this government to do. We saw with JobKeeper that they didn't want to have wage subsidies. I think the Prime Minister's quote was that it was a dangerous step. We all remember the queues outside Centrelink of people who were forced onto the dole queues because this Prime Minister was too stubborn to do wage subsidies until he was dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing it. It is the same with these payments. For days we saw Victorians locked down, losing their jobs, and the Prime Minister refusing to step up: 'Oh, it's a state responsibility. It's a local government responsibility. It's somebody else's responsibility. It's anyone else's responsibility.' He's got 10 arms running around pointing at other people rather than having one finger which puts it on him. It's his job. So Victorians, I think, will be happy that they're getting these payments, but do you know what? I reckon they'd be a lot happier if they didn't have to get them in the first place. I reckon they'd be a lot happier if they could just get vaccinated and be kept safe from hotel quarantine breaches.

This bill will provide time limited assistance to eligible workers who are unable to earn their usual income as a result of public health restrictions. It contains two parts. The first creates a special appropriation to draw funds from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the payment of the COVID-19 disaster payment over the next financial year. The second part of the bill creates a reporting requirement through the new National Recovery and Resilience Agency for payments through the special appropriation. Essentially, this bill guarantees that funding will be available to activate recovery payments for workers affected by lockdowns. That's why the opposition will be supporting this bill. It's something we called for well before the Prime Minister agreed to it.

What this bill doesn't do is lock in eligibility criteria for this payment, which we know from the recent COVID lockdown in Victoria left many struggling workers and families out in the cold. Labor will continue to fight to make sure that all workers hit by COVID are properly supported by this government. Supporting this bill will not change that.

We know that the Prime Minister was dragged, kicking and screaming, by the opposition and the Victorian government to provide any support to workers during this lockdown, just like this Prime Minister and this government had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to make JobKeeper payments available when COVID first hit this country. If it were up to the Prime Minister, he would have done what he has always done—blame the Labor states and then do nothing—but Australians are starting to see through this Prime Minister. The truth is that the reason were still having lockdowns and the reason why this legislation is necessary is that the Prime Minister has failed to bring this pandemic under control. He has had two jobs—the vaccine rollout and quarantine—and he has failed at both. Only about four per cent of Australia has received both doses of a COVID vaccine. We are so far back in the queue you can't even imagine seeing the front of it. Last week the government said that only one out of 11 workers were fully vaccinated. Yesterday we found out that about 15 per cent of aged-care workers have been fully vaccinated. They are priority 1a. It doesn't get any higher than priority 1a, and it's only 15 per cent of aged-care workers.