Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the questions asked by Labor senators during this question time. It is instructive to notice that once again the Labor opposition are so completely disconnected from the people of this nation and from the reality of what is happening, particularly in regional parts of the country but also in the cities. To have this incredible line of questioning about what the Prime Minister's stance is just seems to me to smack of people who have not been watching what's going on over the last 18 months.

The Prime Minister had established a national cabinet to allow the premiers of the states, of our federated nations, to come together and to provide the sort of leadership and direction that this nation so sorely was crying out for at the beginning of this pandemic. It was the Treasurer, the Prime Minister and the cabinet of this federal government that pulled together and quickly came to the fore with financial support through JobKeeper and JobSeeker and a range of incentives to allow people to feel confident that there would be food on the table and that they could pay the rent during this time of extraordinary uncertainty.

It was the state governments that would, each time, walk away from the national cabinet process, having agreed amongst themselves what the next step would be, and then do whatever it was that they darn well liked. For that reason, the Prime Minister has been doing what Australians have been asking him to do: to stand up and call out the inconsistencies in the requirements of the state governments. I have a list here of the different sorts of vaccine mandates across Australia. This is not Europe. This is not a continent divided by different governments and organisations. This is our own nation, where to cross borders is so complicated that, for those of us who have staff to assist, they spend all their time updating people in our electorates and states simply about how to see family and move around the country.

In my state of Queensland, in just a couple of weeks, that Labor government will ensure that there are businesses that close, that there are young people who won't be working, that there are Indigenous Australians who've been left behind by the extraordinary lack of support for the vaccination process in Queensland. We all remember the Chief Health Officer saying that she wouldn't have anybody vaccinated with AstraZeneca and the politics that was played in that state because it suited the Labor states to play politics with these vaccination measures. So now we're in a situation where Labor has once again walked away from workers, walked away from Indigenous communities and left them vulnerable and exposed. We have ambulance ramping and hospital ramping in our state that sends my blood cold, because when COVID-19 comes into our state—as it will, as we know it has across the rest of the world—we will be in a very difficult situation when we have hospitals that can't cope with the most basic of health requirements at a time when flu illnesses are down, when illnesses that are spread by transmission are reduced because of the restrictions that we have in place. And Queensland is incredibly vulnerable, thanks to the game playing and the politics that Labor continues with.

So, I say: thank God to have a Prime Minister who's willing to stand up and support Australians, to call out some of the crazy restrictions and measures that state governments are putting in place and to say to Australians, 'I hear you.' And when premiers say, 'We will reward you for your good behaviour,' I say, how dare they? How dare they talk about rewarding Queensland businesses for the hard work they have done? Where is the acknowledgement of the terrible impacts on small business, on mental health? So, I say: thank goodness for the Prime Minister standing up for Australians. (Time expired)