Senate debates

Thursday, 24 June 2021

Bills

COVID-19 Disaster Payment (Funding Arrangements) Bill 2021; Second Reading

11:08 am

Photo of Helen PolleyHelen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the COVID-19 Disaster Payment (Funding Arrangements) Bill 2021. The first part of the bill creates a special appropriation to draw funds from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the COVID-19 disaster payment. The second part creates a reporting requirement for payments through the special appropriations.

First, I note that this bill would not have been necessary if the government was, in fact, a competent government. The Australian people know too well that this tired, old Morrison government has mishandled the pandemic from the very outset. They have mishandled the rollout of the vaccine and they have mishandled quarantine. To this day, only three per cent of Australians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The only reason this legislation is before this place is that the Morrison government has failed to bring the pandemic under control. Whether through the vaccine rollout, hotel quarantine or cutting off JobKeeper in an ongoing pandemic, this government has failed Australian workers and it has failed Australian businesses.

We have also seen firsthand the ongoing failure of this government in cutting the supplement that was being paid to aged-care workers to prevent them from having to do what too many of them do on a day-to-day basis, and that is work across multiple aged-care homes. I might add that this government has done nothing to raise the remuneration of these frontline, hardworking, committed workers in the aged-care sector, so they gave them a supplement during the pandemic initially so that they wouldn't be forced to work across multiple aged-care homes, to try and assist with containing the pandemic. But they lifted that far too early, and what did they have to do when Victoria went back into lockdown? They had to re-engage and go back to funding that supplement.

Every Australian has felt for the Victorian community in so far as they have now had a number of lockdowns. But what we've seen from this government is an allocation of less than $3 for each Victorian who was forced into lockdown. Again, for many Victorian workers and, again, for many businesses, particularly small businesses, that was far too little, far too late. As fellow Australians, those Victorians deserve so much better from this government. Mr Frydenberg has only coughed up a fraction of the $100 million a day that the Treasury secretary warned could be lost because of this lockdown. Victorians shouldn't have to be out of pocket because they had to go into a fourth lockdown; it was not their doing. It is clearly the Morrison government's responsibility to roll out the vaccines in this country—it took them while to admit that that was actually their responsibility, particularly their aged-care minister—and they also have the fundamental responsibility for quarantine, and again they have failed in both of those.

We've heard Mr Morrison say on a number of occasions that the rollout of the vaccine isn't a race. Hello, Mr Morrison? There is not another Australian out there in the community—there might be in part of your party room—who believes that it isn't a race to roll out the vaccine. It is in fact a very important race to get ahead of the pandemic, because the pandemic is on two fronts. The first is the health outcome, and we've seen Australians die. The second is the effect on our economy, on Australian workers, on Australian jobs. Only three per cent of Australians have had both jabs and are fully vaccinated—again a failure by this government to meet its own announcement about when this rollout would be completed and they would be able to vaccinate and keep Australians safe.

Australians want to return to normality; that's what they want to do. We want visitors coming to my island state of Tasmania. Hotel workers and other people in the hospitality and the tourism sector want to know that they can go back to running their businesses and employ their workers, knowing that there are not going to be any further lockdowns. But to ensure that that happens the government should have from the outset addressed the reality that hotels are built to accommodate people on either business or holiday, as they are everywhere else in the world, but they're not actually built for quarantine in a pandemic as severe as we have now with COVID-19. And now the mutations of that are proving that hotels are in fact the worst place—in inner cities around this country—to house people who are going into quarantine. So this government again has failed to provide, around the country, purpose-built quarantine facilities. We have one such facility, and there has not been one outbreak from that centre. Surely, even the slow learners on that side of the chamber and the slow-learning Prime Minister can see that it is a failure to continue to have quarantine in our cities in hotels.

What we've seen over the course of this pandemic from those opposite is that they love to come into the chamber and blame the Victorian state government for the quarantine failures. Well, yes, there were learnings. There were learnings in relation to those people who were meant to be providing security. But those lessons around the country have been, overwhelmingly learnt by the state governments. But this government has not learnt the lesson about ensuring that Australians are kept safe while they try to roll out the vaccine—which they have bungled. It's almost like everything these people touch, they stuff. But they haven't learnt the fundamental responsibility that they have, and that is to ensure there's adequate, safe, purpose-built quarantine in this country.

What we have also seen from this government in a very important sector in this country, one where there are a lot of vulnerable Australians—the aged-care sector—is that they haven't been able to roll out the vaccines for workers in the aged-care sector. Nor have they in the disability sector, and they still don't have a reliable methodology for reporting tangible evidence on how many workers in the aged-care and disability sectors have been fully vaccinated.

I'm a proud Tasmanian and I live in the north of the state. I've had things reported back to me from my electorate office this week, and that's happening week by week. This week a gentleman from George Town, a beautiful place on the Tamar River, rang frustrated and concerned because he wants the Pfizer vaccine. He has been, as all Tasmanians have been, urged to get vaccinated, but he's reporting to my office that there is a very slow rollout and people can't access the Pfizer vaccine. That's anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me that, when you have a number of people from the same community making contact with your office, there's got to be something in it.

I also had a lady ring the office this week concerned about the efficacy of AstraZeneca vaccine. She too wants the Pfizer vaccine. Because this government have failed to get more Australians vaccinated in a timely manner, what we see now is people saying, 'No, I don't want AstraZeneca; I want to wait for Pfizer,' which means the whole herd immunity that we have been trying to encourage Australians to be part of is going to be delayed. We already have an issue with younger members of our community in their 20s, 30s and 40s who don't really want to have the vaccine because they're concerned that the information that's coming out to them gets changed. Even people who have had their first jab of AstraZeneca, which I have had myself, are now questioning whether they should have the second jab. That should be a major concern for this government. What we haven't seen from this government is an effective advertising campaign that is encouraging Australians to get their vaccine, to reassure them that these vaccines, whichever one it is, are safe and give you protection. There may have to be boosters—that's probably likely—like we have with the flu vaccine each year. But the reality is that, no matter where you look, this government keeps failing, at a time when we can ill afford for this government to fail.

Unfortunately, we have seen too many Australians pass away from COVID-19 over the course of the last 12 months or so. We have learnt those lessons, and, in terms of those people in residential aged care who have been vaccinated, the figures are far better than they were even a month ago. But we have still failed to ensure, for the beneficiaries of home-care packages, that the workers who are going into the homes of those vulnerable older Australians have been fully vaccinated. Again, there is no evidence that this government has any real-time data to give that reassurance to the Australian community. I have a particularly strong concern for older Australians, particularly because I come from Tasmania, where we have the oldest population. The Tasmanian community and its seniors are more vulnerable—but not that much more, I have to say. It probably equates to that of the Northern Territory community and our First Nations people.

This government has brought in this legislation primarily because they have bungled this. As I said earlier, the supplement that was being paid to aged-care workers around this country to ensure that they were not having to work across various homes—which they do because their salaries are not enough for them to provide for their families—should not have been removed until we were through with and had dealt with this pandemic. That would have been the sensible thing to do. The fact that aged-care workers, who are on the front line, can't provide for their families on their salaries is a real disgrace. They are the people who, on a day-to-day basis, give care and support to some of the most vulnerable members of our community. It's a real disgrace in this country. It's a disgrace, because this government did not support them when they were seeking to have their wages increased to enable them to provide for their families.

We have known for a long time now—since Mr Morrison has been the Prime Minister of this country and the Leader of the Liberal Party—that he is a man who is very loose with the truth. Any commitment that he gives can be taken with a grain of salt. This is a government that is driven by ego. It's a government that is driven by self-interest, and it lacks the compassion and leadership that this country so desperately needs.

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