Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier we heard Senator Small tell a fairy story about what's happened with COVID-19 in this country. Self-deception runs right through this government. The truth is that, as an island nation with a good health system, we had an enormous opportunity to withstand the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic that have affected the world so badly. We had an enormous opportunity. An island nation in the Southern Hemisphere, we had to get two things right: No. 1, we had to get a decent system of quarantine and, No. 2, we had to get the vaccine strategy right. Both of those things were so utterly bungled that we have squandered this opportunity. How dare he or Mr Morrison wander around saying, 'We've saved 30,000 people's lives'? It's a bit like Mr Morrison a few months ago, when the women's march was out the front, saying, 'It's lucky people weren't shooting at them.' It's a very low bar this government sets itself in terms of achievement.

The lockdowns in New South Wales and in Victoria were entirely a product of the greatest public policy failure in Australian history. The Morrison government were utterly incapable of doing what was required to protect ordinary Australian families from the ravages of this virus. Billions of dollars worth of economic activity was stopped dead in its tracks, leaving hundreds of thousands of jobs gone and public finances in absolute tatters. These jokers who say so much about economic management have trashed the Australian economy and trashed public finances because they couldn't manage the health response.

There's a famous quote from Catch-22, where Joseph Heller wrote:

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

This bloke, the Prime Minister, has, in a stunning achievement, managed all three of those things in the same three years. There's no crisis that this Prime Minister can't ignore until it's too late. He has not grown into the job; he has shrunk. There is no opportunity that he can't squander, no problem that he can't hide from. Even this week, while preparing for the most consequential international summit of his prime ministership, he is somehow absent. Until a few days ago, we didn't even know if he was going to have the courage to appear, to turn up.

He has a task in front of him. I think people have been generous in saying that his problem is the National Party. The problem that he has is not just the National Party; it's the rump of backward ideologues—antiscience, antiempiricist, backward reactionaries—in his own Liberal Party backbench. You know the reason that they're there? He encouraged them to be there. He and former Prime Minister Abbott went on this long antiscience, antiempirical, backward-looking thing—Robert Menzies would have been ashamed of the conduct of the modern Liberal Party—and they encouraged all these characters to emerge in their branches, and suddenly it turns out they've all got a vote. Suddenly they all turn up in parliament, because of your failure of leadership. And now guess what? They're in charge of the show. You can't manage to pull off the most basic requirement of leadership. It requires leadership and conviction from a man who has no capacity for leadership and no convictions at all. He's delegated the task of leadership in this instance to the Deputy Prime Minister, who in turn has denied the very possibly of leadership at all. And they've left an ocean of space for the fringe dwellers on the backbench. Minister Pitt has proposed a $250 billion fund. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone out the door because this government can't manage its COVID vaccine response, and now they want an extra $250 billion of public money for a loan facility. That makes the Khemlani loans affair look like a corner shop operation. They know, Senator Canavan knows, that that will have the effect of pushing up home mortgage rates for ordinary Australians and pushing up the cost of doing business for ordinary small and medium enterprises. And do you know what that will mean? Falling living standards and lost jobs. It will mean power prices go up, not down. It is the most backward-looking response you can imagine.

And Senator Rennick? What a surprise he's in here with nuclear power stations! Where are the nuclear power stations going to be? Why on earth do we want to put up the price of electricity and have unaffordable energy approaches in this country? Why? Because all these backward-looking characters on the backbench, who actually run the show, have been told they can frolic with any dumb idea they like. Where will these nuclear reactors be? Will they be in Jervis Bay? Will they be in Fremantle? Will they be in Port Stephens? Will they be in Hervey Bay? Those are the places that have been recommended before—and the Latrobe Valley and Portland in Victoria. They are all on the list drawn up by former chief scientists. What a joke! So we've had eight years of shambolic failure on climate policy, a shambolic response to this grave national crisis.

If the National Party fails to endorse the Prime Minister's net zero policy before he leaves for Glasgow, are the Nationals going to leave the cabinet? Who's going to be the Deputy Prime Minister? Who's going to be the Acting Prime Minister when this conference starts? This is an utter shambles, and all this swirling chaos comes back to one thing: an utter incapacity for leadership from this man, the Prime Minister. The backbench isn't the only group that's reacted to this failure of leadership, this vacuum. Last week featured the astonishing scene of the New South Wales Premier announcing the end of the international border. He forgot—it's so easy to forget—that it's a Commonwealth responsibility. Why? Because the Prime Minister is utterly absent. He's spent the whole of this pandemic in the shadow of the state premiers.

The national cabinet has descended into a farce. It's not national and, after the decision of Justice White, it's certainly not a cabinet. The national plan is scarcely national and it's certainly not a plan. And last week the man who built his political career saying, 'I stopped the boats,' is suddenly no longer in charge of the international borders. You can't chalk this up as unfortunate miscommunication. It's entirely consistent with this Prime Minister's total absence, his total lack of vision. So even as Sydney and Melbourne emerge from the Morrison lockdown, the country still faces enormous challenges. There remain pockets of unvaccinated, vulnerable people, particularly in the regions. I heard the Deputy Prime Minister say on Insiders a month before the lockdown, 'We're well ahead in the regions. We're ahead of the cities,' and I wondered if he had access to some secret trove of information that we've been denied. It turns out that he was entirely making it up. Vaccination rates and the supply of vaccines in his own electorate of New England are 10 to 15 per cent behind the rest of the country. Populations in far west New South Wales are at critically low levels of vaccination. So where is the Prime Minister? He's nowhere to be seen. We've seen it so many times before. We saw it during the bushfires. We saw it in response to the women's march. We've seen it in the consistent failure on democratic responsibility. We saw it in the failure to adequately prepare for the evacuation from Afghanistan. We've seen it in the failure to denounce far-Right conspiracy theorists on his backbench. This bloke is just not up to the job.