Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) 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), the Minister for Government Services (Senator Reynolds) and the Leader of the Government in the Senate (Senator Birmingham) to questions without notice asked by Senators McAllister, O'Neill, Pratt and Watt today relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today we saw a very important announcement by the Queensland government, and that is that they will go it alone on the building and funding of a new purpose-built quarantine station in Queensland. There can be no doubt whatsoever that quarantine is a federal responsibility. It is crystal clear in the Australian Constitution. But throughout this pandemic we have seen this Prime Minister and this government shirk their constitutional responsibility to build quarantine facilities to keep Australians safe from COVID-19. In the 18 months since this pandemic began, we have seen not one quarantine facility built by this Prime Minister, despite it being his constitutional responsibility to do so. Yet again we have seen the Prime Minister being slow to act and failing to take responsibility, even when something is set out in the Constitution for all to see.

The result of this government and this Prime Minister's failure to act is that we have now seen 27 leaks of COVID-19 from hotel quarantine, which have caused all sorts of outbreaks across the country, including the most recent, disastrous outbreak in Sydney, which is now recording national record COVID infection numbers. It is that failure from this government to act and build quarantine facilities, along with its failure to deliver the vaccine rollout, that is causing the lockdowns across the country that are causing so much misery and that is putting the remainder of the country at risk.

So I congratulate the Queensland government on its announcement today that it will go it alone and build this quarantine station near Toowoomba in Queensland. We cannot wait any longer for a federal government that refuses to take responsibility and do its job and that is completely slow to act to protect Australians. This proposal is something that was first raised by the Queensland government in January this year. They have had a proposed site since that time and a willing owner, but throughout the process the Prime Minister, rather than taking responsibility, has just made excuse after excuse for why he wouldn't support this quarantine station. First, he said that it doesn't have a suitable hospital, but we established at Senate estimates that the federal Department of Health has never even assessed Toowoomba base hospital to establish whether it is suitable to support a quarantine facility. His other excuse is, of course, that it doesn't have an international airport. That's despite the fact that Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport currently receives international freight flights on many, many occasions, shipping fruit, vegetables and many other products in and out of this country.

So it does have an international airport and it does have a hospital. What it doesn't have is a Prime Minister who's actually prepared to take responsibility and build the quarantine station that Queenslanders need. In fact, the Prime Minister's ignorance of Queensland is so great that he also said that one of the reasons he opposed building a quarantine station near Toowoomba is that we shouldn't have quarantine stations near the desert. How ignorant of Queensland's geography do you have to be to claim that Toowoomba is near the desert? I invite the Prime Minister to get in a car and see how many hours it takes him to get from Toowoomba to the desert so that he actually has some understanding of the state of Queensland.

The Prime Minister has had an absolute shocker of a week bagging Queensland. First, he called us cave dwellers, despite the fact that we have actually managed COVID-19 better than almost any state around Australia, and certainly better than his preferred Liberal state of New South Wales, which he described as being the gold standard and which he praised for their late lockdown. But it's us in Queensland who are the cave dwellers, according to the Prime Minister. Then he went on to blame Queenslanders for our vaccination rates, despite the fact that the vaccine rollout is his job. What is it with this bloke? Every time he has a job, he can't do it, and then he blames someone else for it. Apparently it's Queenslanders' fault for not having enough vaccines put in their arms, even though it's his job, as Prime Minister, to get those vaccinations happening.

Of course, now we see that he's leaving it to Queensland to go it alone in building the quarantine stations that are his job and his responsibility under the Australian Constitution. In fact, he has even had one of his own senators, Senator Canavan, go public today, saying that, in response to the Queensland government's announcement, the federal government should pull Defence Force troops off the Queensland borders. That's the kind of support that Queensland is getting from this government. They have a Prime Minister who just wants to bag us continually and leave us to ourselves, and they even have senators from Queensland who want to rip Defence Force troops off our borders. This government have a problem with Queensland, and it's about time they started delivering.