Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I guess we can't expect anything different as we enter into an election year. The politicking, the smears, the constant creation of fear by all those on the other side is set to continue and, most likely, escalate. The last 45 minutes has demonstrated what all Australians who want to see this place achieve things can see is going to happen over the next couple of months. Stunts, smears and fear—it's all they've got, it's all the other side have to offer Australia. Australians are looking to come out from under the doona. Australians want government to get out of their lives. They want their lives to go back to normal. Australians are desperately hoping that their businesses can start to function as normal, that their kids can go to school as normal. They are hoping that their job security, their social lives and everything that goes on around their kids and the sport that they play—the dance lessons, the rugby season, the cricket—all goes back to normal and parents can start to participate again.

But not over there—no, no, no. There is no way they want Australians going back to any sort of normal life. So today the fear campaign is centred around aged care. Aged care has always been an incredibly difficult area of public policy. It is a sad part of the Australian experience and the Australian community. When people enter aged-care facilities—in particular, high-need aged-care facilities—it is not because they're in a great state of health. They don't go into these sort of situations because they're entering the prime of their lives. They are not. It is absolutely at the sunset of their lives. That's why it's called 'the sunset time of life'. I know this because my mother's in an aged-care home and has been in a high-needs facility for four years. Because of the pandemic, I haven't been able to see her for over 12 months, because no-one is allowed in.

As of today, 100 per cent of aged-care facilities have been offered a booster clinic and have had a booster clinic. But one reason why some people haven't had a booster shot is that their health wasn't able to take it at that point in time, or they were on other medication and they were advised not to receive the booster shot. But never let the truth of a situation get in the way of a smear campaign from those opposite.

We do want Australian families to be together. We do want Australian families to be able to spend time with their loved ones in aged care. We do know that omicron is spread far more easily, but we also know that, when people got omicron, they showed very few symptoms, if any at all. In fact, the vast majority of people didn't even know they had it; they didn't even know they were positive with COVID.

This is another problem that we've got with a lot of the state governments and their reporting. They're obsessed with how many daily cases of COVID there are. Then they start to talk about how many people are in hospital. Then they talk about the deaths from COVID. What they don't talk about is the fact that lots of women go into hospital every day to have a baby. When they go into hospital they're tested for COVID, and a remarkable number of them didn't even know they were COVID positive, but they are then counted in the numbers. We do, unfortunately, see people who have COVID die—and I know those opposite might have forgotten that, ultimately, every single one of us in here is going to die—but they may not have died from COVID. They could have died from cancer or from a gunshot wound to the stomach, but, if they had COVID, they're counted as a COVID death.

This is just continuing to perpetuate the fear that those opposite want to see Australians live under, because you don't like small business and you don't like family-run business. You love a government handout. You love boosting your union mates, making sure you can pay them all as much as possible and shutting down any entrepreneurship or Australian spirit of having a go. You want everyone hiding under the doona. We know that because the world's longest lockdown in history was overseen by your mate Dan Andrews, Premier of Victoria. In terms of federal government responsibility, guess what we also saw last year? It was only in Victoria that we saw the mass outbreak of deaths. The largest number of deaths occurred in Victoria, but no way was this in relation to Victoria! It had nothing to do with Premier Andrews! He was probably too busy trying to deal with Adem Somyurek and what happened with the red shirts, making sure IBAC and the Victorian police never looked into anything. You lot opposite won't ever look into anything if it involves a Victorian premier or a Labor premier. Palaszczuk had Queensland locked off. We know Western Australia can't even handle—