SUBJECTS: Greater Sydney lockdown; Government’s failures on vaccine rollout and quarantine; vaccine supply; Coalition focussed on themselves; lack of public information campaign; vaccination of aged care workers; Scott Morrison’s absence of resposbility; effective vaccination rates; nuclear power. 


ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY:Thanks for joining me. My thoughts today are with the people of Sydney, the Central Coast, the Illawarra, and the Blue Mountains who are doing it tough today as a result of this lockdown, which quite clearly is a necessary lockdown in order to get on top of this severe outbreak in Greater Sydney. The fact is there will not just be an impact in terms of peoples health, and we need people to stay safe to follow the guidelines which are there - we also need the guidelines to be clear, so that people have a clearer understanding of what the instructions are from the health authorities. There is also of course an economic cost. The Australian Industry Group suggests the costs will be in the billions and that is another reason why we need to make sure that we get the health outcomes right so we can have less restrictions on economic activity and people can go about their way of life.

It is a fact, though, that the Morison Government have had two jobs this year: effective national quarantine and the rollout of the vaccine, and they have failed both. This lockdown is a direct result of that. There have now been some 26 outbreaks from hotel quarantine, including ones that are having an impact in the Northern Territory as well with this FIFO worker having contracted Coronavirus as a result of being in hotel quarantine in Brisbane. It's very clear that hotels were built for tourists, they weren't built for quarantine. And the consequences of the Government belatedly only on Friday, acknowledging that there's a need for purpose built facilities is showing up and will continue to show up for months to come. When it comes to the rollout of the vaccine, we're on just 4 per cent of Australians being fully vaccinated. That's in spite of the fact that Scott Morrison said we're at the front of the queue and we're way, way back in that queue. This is a Government that's been too busy focused on congratulating itself and too busy on not doing its main task, which is the rollout of the vaccine and fixing national quarantine.

Instead, we saw this week in Parliament, a Government focused on itself. A Government that replaced the Deputy Prime Minister, and no one can say what that Deputy Prime Minister did wrong to deserve being replaced by a failed former Deputy Prime Minister. Yesterday in the Northern Territory, at the same time as they were dealing with an outbreak, the CLP priority was knocking off a sitting senator from their ticket. This is a Government that's defined by politics, defined by looking after itself, defined by spin rather than substance and we saw that with the Prime Minister's ongoing seeking to divide the states. His ongoing praising of New South Wales but criticising other states who were doing exactly the same thing.

Labor believes that the nation needs to be united and not seek to divide states. Governments need to respond to health advice, as the Berejiklian Government has done yesterday. We think also the fact that this outbreak arose from a transport driver driving foreign crew without a mask, which wasn't designated as compulsory, to hotel quarantine defies belief. It's even worse, that they were clearly advised by Jane Halton in advice last year, that this was a vulnerability that needed to be fixed and the Government ignored it. They were too busy saying how well they were going. Well, we're not going well.

Scott Morrison said this isn't a race. Well, there are six million people in Greater Sydney who know that this was a race and Scott Morrison has been stuck on the starting block, too busy patting himself on the back before the race is run.

MARK BUTLER, SHADOW MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING: Thanks Anthony, today millions of Australians are paying the price for Scott Morrison’s failure to do his two jobs. His stubborn incompetence on vaccines and on quarantine have left Australians dangerously exposed to these latest outbreaks.

ALBANESE: Happy to take questions.

JOURNALIST: Today the paper is quoting quite a few Liberal Coalition MPs who are supportive of the idea of allowing fully vaccinated people to quarantine at home, rather than in hotels. What do you think of that?

ALBANESE: How about they do the job that they've got. I find it extraordinary that the Government have been engaged in coming up with reasons why their failure to do an essential job, getting quarantine right, and then coming out with these distractions. I think that we know the real consequences of what's happening. The real consequences are that Sydney is locked down, the Central Coast has locked down, the Illawarra is locked down, the Blue Mountains is locked down. People are having real restrictions on their economic activity. The fact is that this is having a severe economic impact. The issue here is that so many stranded Australians as well remain stranded overseas. The Prime Minister did say that all Australians will be home by Christmas. We know there's more than 30,000 stranded overseas. I think there's a lot of anger from those people, particularly when we're seeing other activity take place.

BULTER: We've had five hotel quarantine outbreaks just this month, 26 In total. These are happening more often not less, because we're now dealing with more infectious variants of the virus. So, I think Liberal MPs will be better served encouraging the Prime Minister to do his job and make our quarantine system more safe, not less safe. You will not find any public health experts saying we should wind back our quarantine system to a system of home quarantine. The AMA only yesterday said we need purpose built quarantine facilities in every state and every territory.

JOURNALIST: On Friday, the TGA approved the Johnson & Johnson single dose vaccine. We haven't got an agreement to purchase that that vaccine yet in Australia. What do you say that that?

ALBANESE: It’s just extraordinary that you have the TGA approve a vaccine which we don't have access to. It goes to what we were saying last year, including naming explicitly, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, as pharmaceuticals that we should have access to. The problem here is the Government put all its eggs in the AstraZeneca basket and the chickens have come home to roost.

JOURNALIST: As far as I know, I think Mark McGowan might be the only state or territory leader who has issued a public health order to forcibly vaccinate aged care workers and frontline quarantine workers. They discussed this at National Cabinet I think three weeks ago? No other Premier has gone down this path. Do you think it is time all the state and territory leaders now issue this public health order given what's happened with the limo driver, to shut down this avenue of infection?

ALBANESE: This is a separate issue, aged care workers are separate from transport workers.

JOURNALIST: Anyway, there's a problem anyone on the frontline?

ALBANESE: Look, the fact is, it is outrageous that two-thirds of aged care workers aren’t vaccinated in Australia. We are at the end of June. The fact is that the Prime Minister just a while ago, said and I await the next spin, he said we're going to go on “war footing.” Remember that? The “war footing” lasted till Monday, where they had a phone hook-up and then it seemed to have disappeared again. We need far more national consistency when it comes to the rules that are taking place.

One of the things that we've seen, a breakdown of the National Cabinet, something that I've been very consistent on for a long period of time now is that you can't have a circumstance whereby the Prime Minister convenes a so-called National Cabinet, the state Premiers and Chief Ministers tell each other what they're doing, and then Scott Morrison announces it, and then is critical selectively of some state Premiers for doing what they have said they would do. That's the process that we’ve seen. One of the things that I'm concerned about, in general, is that since at least the 1970s, we've seen a more national approach to the way that our Federation functions. Going way back to the reforms under national competition policy. This is the first time in my lifetime that we've seen power go from the Commonwealth to the States and that is because we have a Prime Minister who has handed over responsibility for issues like migration, customs, quarantine, because we have a Prime Minister who is determined to not take responsibility for things that are his job.

JOURNALIST: Given he’s so hopeless don’t you think the states should pick up the reins here and issue public health orders?

ALBANESE: But you need national leadership on this. He is in charge of aged care. We saw last year with aged care in Victoria, him attempting to say he had no responsibility for something that he regulates, for something that he funds, for something he's responsible for. We've also seen the orders withdrawn, which said that aged care workers shouldn't work in multiple facilities. That was a direct result of the Commonwealth, withdrawing what workers had to do rather than increasing protection. That's the role that we've seen from the Commonwealth and it's no wonder that Premier McGowan has had to step up to fill that void.

JOURNALLIST: What about other Premiers?

ALBANESE: I have not been at any time critical of the premiers. That’s Scott Morrison’s game. When you want a national approach, it has to come from national leadership. Scott Morrison had ducked responsibility, time and time again. I've got to say this, yesterday, where was Scott Morrison? I know he’s at the Lodge but he could Zoom into schoolkids to tell them that climate change wasn't Australia's responsibility the other day, he could have had a press conference, Greg Hunt too. State leaders to their credit, Labor and Liberal, have been prepared to step up, take responsibility, and take questions from you good folk, just as myself and Mark are now.

JOURNALIST: Can you tell us at what point, what percentage of the population vaccinated, before we open the national and state borders and allow this disease to circulate in Australia? What's the number?

ALBANESE: I can tell you that the number should be given by health experts not by politicians.

JOURNALIST: Yeah, shouldn't the politicians have to make a decision at some stage? Fifty-six per cent of the population is vaccinated in the UK at the moment. There were 16,000 cases the other day and 18 deaths. Is that level of risk acceptable to you? What level of risk would you be prepared to accept?

ALBANESE: I’d be prepared to listen to and take health advice.

JOURNALIST: The Government says it has been doing that all the way along?

ALBANESE: It has not been doing that. The Government's advice clearly was, going back to go back to the Halton report, she spoke about Exmouth, she spoke about national quarantine facilities. The Government's advice very clearly advice, and I have stood up –

JOURNALIST: She's a former bureaucrat.

ALBANESE: The health advice from the AMA have made that clear as well. And I have said that that is Labor’s position, probably at 250 press conferences since the beginning of last year, as has Mark Butler, as has Chris Bowen. We have said four things that you should do. You roll out the vaccine effectively. You make sure you have national quarantine facilities. You have a public information campaign to promote the rollout of the vaccine and you manufacture mRNA vaccines here. We’ve made that very clear. It's four clear points that were put forward. This Government has failed on all of those measures.

JOURNALIST: Given 30 new cases in NSW to 8pm last night, could this lockdown have actually been avoided, even if the vaccine rollout had gone well? Or is this sort of just the consequences of living in a pandemic?

ALBANESE: I said a couple of days ago, I was concerned that they were using euphemisms to avoid the term lockdown. So we had stay at home orders and that was a direct result of where the Government's got itself, but the Morison Government in particular, in saying that New South Wales doesn't lock down in order to be critical of other states. It's the right thing that the state is locked down now in terms of the areas that are. They are listening to the advice, and I'm not going to be critical of the Berejiklian Government.
I think the issue here is that whilst you have four per cent of the population being fully vaccinated, while you don't have national quarantine facilities, while you have someone driving a foreign air crew around without a mask and getting infected, and then spreading that around, you're going to have these outbreaks. The thing is that it is entirely predictable that unless you take that advice, which is there, then you will have breakouts and you will have consequences of that.

JOURNALIST: Given the slow pace of the vaccine rollout and, sort of, no end in sight for these on-again, off-again lockdowns, will you, and I know there are a lot of unknowns here, but will you take to the next election, which is due within a year, a plan for reopening, a plan for a certain percentage of people, a timeframe for people to be vaccinated if the Government still hasn’t stepped up to the mark yet?

ALBANESE: We’ve said what our four point plan is, and we've said that for many, many months.

JOURNALIST: Are there timeframes?

ALBANESE: We've said that going back to last year. What I hope, Phil, what I hope is, it might be a triumph of hope over experience, is that the Morison Government gets its act together and we actually fix the rollout of vaccine. We can't afford to wait till next year. We need to fix the roll up of the vaccine, the rollout, we need to fix national quarantine facilities. We need to get, remember very early on Scott Morrison, when he was back in spin mode, being critical of Labor for saying “we needed to get the health response right in order to minimise the economic constraints and costs which are there”? He said “Oh, no, no, no, it's not a matter of either-or”, this was when a year ago, he was saying, you know, “just open up”. The truth is that we did need to do that, we still need to do that. I'm for as little economic constraint as possible. But unless you fix the health concerns, you won't be able to achieve that.

JOURNALIST: Do you need a vaccine campaign to start sooner rather than later? The Government says that we'll have a bigger campaign when we have more vaccines. But do you think that's waiting too long? And just secondly, on a completely different matter, Barnaby Joyce is very keen on nuclear energy. Do you think nuclear energy should be part of the energy mix to help us reduce emissions by 2030?

ALBANESE: I’ll come back to that, but the first question was?

JOURNALIST: On the vaccine campaign, do we need something now rather than when we have lots of vaccines?

ALBANESE: Well, what we had in Senate Estimates this week, or a Senate Committee meeting, on the same day that the Government was focused on rolling out the Deputy Prime Minister rather than rolling out the vaccine, we got told the reason why they can't have a public information campaign is that there's no supply of the vaccine. So, if more people were stepping up to be vaccinated, they couldn't actually get jabs in the arm. But this Government's priority was stabbing, not jabbing. And that's what we saw this week, the stabbing of the Deputy Prime Minister instead of the jabbing of arms because there's lack of supply. Now we have New South Wales, New South Wales people can't get, all the experience is that when you have a lockdown in Victoria, you saw the vaccination rates increased substantially. That can't happen at the moment in New South Wales because they don't have supply. And when we raise questions about that in the Parliament, about the Premier's comments to the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister basically said that that wasn't true. He called Gladys Berejiklian out and said “nah, nah, she hasn’t raised any issues of supply with me”. Well, that's just nonsense. Premier Berejiklian and Minister Hazzard have consistently raised issues of supply. But it's extraordinary that after more than, you know, we're 18 months into this pandemic, and the Government can’t roll out a public information campaign. This is a government that spent a billion dollars advertising itself, it can advertise roads that don't exist, and programs that aren't actually being rolled out, pat itself on the back with the Budget nonsense, full page ads. I know that that will be appreciated by some of you but the truth is that those ads didn't provide any public information whatsoever. They were just spin.

When it comes to Barnaby Joyce and nuclear power. I note Barnaby Joyce’s comments who has said that every town with a hill is suitable to have a small nuclear power plant. I welcome that debate with Barnaby Joyce in the regional towns of Australia. Labor is opposed to nuclear power plants being built in Australia. It's in our platform. It's uneconomic, it doesn't stack up. It says something about a government that regards a wind turbine as being an eyesore and a blight on a community, but a nuclear power plant with the consequential issues of waste and other issues that are unresolved as being “no problem, nothing to see here”.

JOURNALIST: Given the vaccine supply issues aren't going to be resolved in the short term do you think we should open up Astra Zeneca to a wider population to make their own risk-benefit analysis?

ALBANESE: I think we should take the health advice. And the health advice on that has changed. One of the things that we haven't done throughout this crisis is we have been consistent about supporting health advice.

JOURNALIST: Mark, can I just ask you a question? Indigenous Australians were in the highest priority group to get vaccinated. We've now seen someone infected in the Northern Territory. How concerned are you about the virus getting into remote indigenous communities? Has this now put them at risk?

BUTLER: Well, I think we're deeply concerned about any risk in remote Aboriginal communities. We know that that is a population particularly vulnerable, as is the Aged Care population. So, I think everyone's greatly concerned at the latest report in the Northern Territory. And we'll be monitoring that over the course of today.

JOURNALIST: What is an effective vaccination rate? What percentage?

ALBANESE: Well, it's not four per cent. And that's what we've got from this Government.

JOURNALIST: Well what is it? 70 per cent? 80 per cent? 90 per cent?

ALBANESE: It's not four per cent.

JOURNALIST: What is it? You say there’s got to be an effective program. There has to be a target. If you say it has to be effective, tell us, when will you know that we’ve reached an effective rate in your mind?

ALBANESE: Four per cent is not an effective rate. Everyone knows that. That's where the Government is at. That's why the Government has failed. Thanks.