Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This summer has been a summer from hell for disabled people. It has been a summer of fear, a summer of isolation and a summer of death. Disabled people have died across our community, and the Morrison government bears responsibility. The incompetence! The absolute and total inability to listen to disabled people when we reach out to our government as we have done through every stage of this pandemic! At the beginning, when we thought we were going to drop dead any minute, we put everything aside. We put aside our historic knowledge of how we have suffered at the hands of this government. We put that aside and attempted to work to keep our community safe. We did so many hours of unpaid work. Organisations that have been structurally underfunded for the best part of a decade put everything on hold to come and sit with you people at a table and offer our best hopes, our lived experience and our expertise, with the sole goal of keeping our friends, our families and our loved ones alive. And you did what you always do: you took our good faith and you repaid it with tokenism. And, once we started to get a bit annoying, you shut us out of the process.

You failed us through the first wave. You failed to order the vaccine. You failed to roll the vaccine out. When it stopped working as it should have, you deprioritised us. You deprioritised disabled people to cover up your own incompetence. Through delta, you failed to get us PPE, you failed to invest in ventilation and you failed to order the tests that your own Prime Minister was saying at press conferences we would need. It all came to bear with omicron. Driven by your corporate donors who were so desperate to begin making money again, you rammed down the borders and the protective mechanisms. People like the Premier of New South Wales lectured the community about the need to stand up to COVID and to live with the pandemic. Well, for a disabled person, for an older person, for the immunocompromised and for First Nations people, there is no living with COVID-19. Unprotected, unvaccinated and unsupported, we die. We have died, and we will continue to die, under this government. You bear that responsibility.

We had so many chances as a nation to get this right. We had so many opportunities to order the right vaccines, to give people the money they needed to manage, to give people access to the PPE, to put ventilators in schools and to give people the confidence and the ability to manage this together. At every turn, because it was too inconvenient, because it cost your donors too much money and because it dared to suggest that there is such a thing as a society wherein we have a mutual obligation to one another, you rejected it. Two years in, not a single person in the Australian government can tell me how many disabled people have died, because nobody has been collecting the data. Every day, chief health officers and state premiers go out to the media and give the COVID death figures, but they assure us that so many of these people had underlying conditions, were at the end of life or had a terminal condition—complex, co-occurring morbidities. Forty per cent of the Australian population has either a disability or an underlying condition, and this government and state governments have written us off as an acceptable collateral casualty. It's not good enough. The Greens do not accept it. We will never accept it. We will always push back. (Time expired)