Scott Morrison had two jobs in 2021 - roll out the Covid-19 vaccine and fix the nation’s broken quarantine system.

The PM has bungled both.

That’s why 18 months into the global pandemic fewer than 8 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated, far less than the United States and the United Kingdom, where nearly half of the people have had both jabs.

It’s also why Australian cities continue to be forced into regular lockdowns after 26 instances of the Covid virus escaping the flawed hotel quarantine system.

Mr Morrison’s failures are endangering lives, putting people out of work, shutting down businesses and preventing a return to normal.

It didn’t have to be like this.

But the government’s complacency and incompetence is squandering all of the good work Australians and their state governments put in during 2020.

As long ago as November, Mr Morrison insisted Australians were “at the front of the queue’’ for receiving vaccines, an impression he continued to push as he held a photo opportunity for his own vaccination on February 21.

This was never true. That is because Mr Morrison didn’t secure enough deals for vaccines quickly enough and in sufficient quantities.

From as early as March 2020, smart governments around the world were signing deals with drug companies which were developing vaccines.

Nations including the United States and Canada were also hedging their bets by signing contracts with up to six drug companies so that if one vaccine failed, they would have other options.

Mr Morrison dithered, something that Labor pointed out more than a year ago. We know that in June last year, drug company Pfizer contacted the Australian government to assess its interest in buying its vaccine.

In spite of the fact there was a meeting in July, a Pfizer deal was not done until November 4after the company had already committed to provide more than one billion doses to 34 other nations. From Australia’s position, we could not even see the front of the Pfizer queue. No wonder we are still struggling to source enough Pfizer to meet our needs.

And our other vaccine, AstraZeneca, has been the subject of changing medical advice due to its links with a rare clotting condition.

There was no way the Australian government could have anticipated the difficulties with AstraZeneca, which medical experts now recommend for people aged over 60 years.

The problem is that Mr Morrison put all of his eggs in the AstraZeneca basket, ignoring advice to adopt the world’s best practice of sealing deals for four to six vaccines. Now, with Sydney in lockdown, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Australians want to be vaccinated. But we don’t have enough vaccines. And vaccine supply is Mr Morrison’s responsibility.

So is quarantine. In the absence of purpose-built national quarantine centres, hotels have been used. But they are built for tourists and there have been 26 leaks of the virus from hotels into the community.

For a year, experts have been calling for the government to create new isolation centres similar to the Howard Springs workers’ camp near Darwin, where travellers have been isolated with no leakage of the virus into the community. Labor has been making the same point, urging the government to create new centres across the nation.

In the early days of Covid, hotels had to be used. But Mr Morrison has had 18 months to act.

He has failed to act and there are still more than 30,000 Australians stuck overseas.
Australians were assured that nursing home residents and their carers would be vaccinated by Easter.

It’s now July and the head of a Sydney aged care facility subject to an outbreak revealed this week that two-thirds of her staff had still not been vaccinated.

That’s an incredible failure given the government’s earlier assurances that the most vulnerable Australians would be protected.

Mr Morrison also said four million Australians would be vaccinated by the end of March. But he missed that target by 3.4 million.

With our economy depending upon a return to normal conditions, Scott Morrison has let his people down. Our government should have built dedicated quarantine facilities, fixed the vaccination rollout, started a mass advertising campaign, and manufactured mRNA vaccines locally.

This opinion piece was first published in the Courier Mail on Friday, 9 July 2021.