Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on vaccine related issues. Earlier this week the Morrison government announced what they describe as 'a complete refresh' for Australia's vaccine rollout. That review was revealed at the hearing of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 on Monday evening. The Health department secretary, Brendan Murphy, and vaccination task force head, Lieutenant General Frewen, appeared before the committee. Lieutenant General Frewen is now 'completely reviewing the rollout strategy and the timeframes' in what was described as 'a complete refresh of the plan'. He told the committee this review was separate to the normal refinements and recalibrations carried out as medical advice changed over time.

It's understandable that the government should wish to review what is the single biggest and most complex inoculation campaign in the nation's history. However, in this case, a root-and-branch review is absolutely vital, because Australia's COVID-19 vaccination plan has proved to be a shambles. As one leading expert in the field Professor Bill Bowtell from the Kirby Institute for infection immunity recently observed, there has been 'a great failure in procurement and supply'. It has indeed been a great failure. One would say it's one of the worst public policy implementation failures in the history of the Commonwealth. A debacle of colossal proportions.

The Morrison government told us we would be 'at the front of the queue' and that we would be 'in the leading pack' when it came to vaccines. Instead, we're in the slow lane, lagging way behind many developed countries, including the United States, the UK and Canada. Yesterday, it was announced by the White House that the United States will likely just fall short of meeting President Joe Biden's goal of delivering at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot of 70 per cent of adults by 4 July.

If only we had such a shortfall here. Although the Morrison government has had well over a year to get this right, there has been one shambles after another. At every turn there have been crippling problems, ranging from a failure to secure the widest range of vaccine supplies to delays in international delivery to local production issues—and just the delivery of vaccines within Australia. Despite efforts to broaden vaccine procurement, we still have seen far too much reliance on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is now limited to a narrow cohort of Australians, aged above 60, and the government has had its reputation trashed, so much so that many people are reluctant to be immunised.

The government announced more than a dozen target revisions, or updates, to the rollout timetable since the beginning of the year. The original long-term target was to fully vaccinate all 20 million adults by October. That plan was later scrapped and all targets were abandoned after medical advice recommended against AstraZeneca for under-50s. However, even before that decision, the government had missed every goal for the vaccination campaign. It fell drastically short of its target for February, delivering little more than half of the 63,000 doses allocated for the first week of the vaccination campaign. The government fell more than 3.3 million doses short in its target to deliver at least four million doses by the end of March—a goal later pushed back to early April and then to mid April. The last goal, before the revised AstraZeneca advice, committed to delivering some 2.5 million doses by 5 April. Australia had only one million doses on 8 April. There's the contrast.

Now AstraZeneca is further restricted to those of us who are over 60 or, of course, those who've already had an AstraZeneca shot, such as me. Now, in the third week of June, some 6,700,000 doses of COVID vaccine have been delivered across Australia. It's been estimated that at our current pace of roughly 712,000 doses a week Australia would only reach the 40 million doses that are needed in order to fully vaccinate Australia's adult population in mid May 2022. Hopefully the government will pick up the pace, but far too much time has been lost—and all the while Australia remains vulnerable, exposed to the new, more-infectious variants of COVID-19 and subject to frequent restrictions and lockdowns, as no quarantine system is ever perfect in the case of such a ferociously infectious disease.

If there's any doubt about the extent of the government's failure in all this, even the Australian has editorialised that:

The federal government is losing credibility with its management of the vaccine rollout and its repeated claims that everything is on track.

Things are pretty bad when the Australian points to a government failure. But it's very hard to miss this one, as the cost to the community, the cost to key industries like tourism and international education, is huge. One can only hope that this latest complete refresh of the vaccination program will deliver some results and see a radical acceleration of the vaccine rollout. But all the while the government's failure has been shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, as Professor Bottrell has observed and told A Current Affair, 'Our culture of secrecy has got us to where it is today.' Secrecy has been a characteristic of the government's policy—at every level secrecy, imposed by our so-called national cabinet, created by the Prime Minister, and secrecy imposed upon the Senate COVID-19 select committee, with officials pleading confidentiality at every turn, and secrecy imposed in relation to freedom of information.

I've actually attempted an FOI request in relation to the vaccine. I wanted to see why a South Australian company with an impeccable track record in developing vaccines wasn't given an opportunity in relation to grants back in February and March last year. I FOI'd the award of a vaccine grant by the Medical Research Future Fund to the University of Queensland, which of course has ties with CSL. What did I get back? A volume of blank paper—30 or 40 documents completely redacted. I want to alert the chamber to something here. The MRFF is a $20 billion program. It's a program that I think everyone in here would support, but, let me tell you, no-one gets to see who makes applications for the hundreds and hundreds of grants that this program delivers, and no-one gets to see who makes the decisions on who gets awarded these grants and no-one gets to see the results. One would expect that, at least, if someone was awarded public funding then the assessment in relation to their grant would be made public. That is the case with the exact same program in the United States. NIH, the National Institutes of Health, which is their program, will generally release the following types of records pursuant to an FOI request: funded applications; funded progress reports, including award data; and final reports that have been transmitted to the recipient organisation of any audits, surveys, reviews or evaluations of recipient performance. So in the United States they name the people who are involved in making decisions. There are protections in place. You can't, as a grant applicant, ring them and harass them or complain to them, but at least you know who they are. And the successful applicant can expect to have their grant proposal scrutinised. That's exactly as it should be. Right now, we have an organisation—again, the chamber needs to be aware of this—that grants up to $20 billion of taxpayers' money in total secrecy. It's like sports rorts on steroids, run by a collective of people who make a grant to someone else knowing that the next time around a grant will come their way. That is totally unacceptable. It is a corruption incubator, and that has to change. We've got a vaccine rollout that needs to be re-examined and totally reorganised, but I alert you to the fact that the MRFF needs to adopt a position of transparency. I'm onto this task.