COVID-19 Vaccinations for MPs

Ms SHEED (Shepparton) (12:29): I am pleased to rise and speak on this motion. I note that the last time a motion like this was before the house everyone supported the motion, and here we are now, a couple of months later, looking at an extension of it because of the circumstances we have found ourselves in. I think last December, when Parliament rose for the holiday break, we were all hoping that the changes to the laws that had been made may not even be required to the extent that they had been. There was a sense that perhaps we were moving forward from the delta strain. There was just a hint that omicron was on the horizon. Omicron unfortunately has gone wild over the last couple of months, and we have seen the impacts of that on our community. I think it is with great relief that so many in our community are vaccinated, because the impact has been much less in terms of serious illness and death than would have been the case were it not for vaccinations.

In my community so many people have been vaccinated. Shepparton has a very high rate of first and second doses of vaccination, and just today there is the launch of a campaign to really increase the numbers of those people attending to get their third dose of the vaccination. There is great support for vaccination in the community, and by far the overwhelming majority of people have supported it and have been vaccinated.

We saw the predictions in early January of the possible risks to our hospital system, and our health services saw quite an impact on those systems—just barely able to cope, with the furloughing of staff and so many staff away and so many people having difficulty coping—to the extent that these limits on elective surgery were required. It is probably salutary to note that of our hospital beds, something like 50 per cent of those hospital beds are being taken up by people who are unvaccinated. If 6 per cent of the population are unvaccinated and 50 per cent of the beds are being occupied by those who are unvaccinated, there is a real message in that. The importance of vaccinations is really spelt out by that sort of thing.

I think it is really important also to note that the processes around getting access to elective surgery have really been impacted by the overwhelming strain that was put on the hospital system. We have all had people contact our electorate offices—people who have been so negatively impacted by the delays in having surgery. So we have not come out of this. I respect the contributions that everyone has made in this place, coming at it from so many different angles, and they all have good arguments about it. There are many things that we are so tired of as a community. We so want to move on. We so want our freedoms back. We do not want this virus impacting on our community the way it has for the last two years. That overwhelming sense of tiredness with the way we have had to live is just right through our community, and people are looking forward to something different.

Without wanting to be negative about it, it was only days ago that the commonwealth chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, said that we may well be facing another surge of omicron as winter comes on. So we are not out of it yet. There are a lot of measures that still will be required from time to time, and we cannot hide from that fact. I am quite influenced by the fact that the chief medical officer of the commonwealth has really warned of that, and I think it will impact on decisions that are made at national cabinet and in our states going forward. Protection of the community is really the paramount consideration that has been at the forefront of governments across the country in determining what steps need to be taken in relation to the community and how we have behaved over the last two years.

Last week there were about 200 Victorians who died of COVID. Today we are told 20 people have died. Every week hundreds of people are dying in Victoria—a lot more across the country. We are not out of the woods—nowhere near it—and it is very important to think about the impact of that. We all probably know someone now who has had COVID. The omicron variant is rife in the community. Do we all know someone who has died? I do. In my community quite a few people have died from it. They are elderly people and they are vulnerable people; they are people who if they had not had COVID would not have died at that time. Their lives are very valuable to them and to their families. As hard as it is for some of these decisions to be made and to be complied with, it is being done for a reason, because those people are a part of our community too—the disabled, the children with autoimmune diseases, the elderly who are dying in large numbers still. We are becoming almost desensitised to the fact that that is the case.

If there were 200 people a week being killed on our roads, we would be taking extraordinary additional steps to address that. We all jump in our cars and put on our seatbelts without thinking about it. We are being asked to do something so much greater here at this time because we are in a worldwide pandemic, a once-in-100-year pandemic, something that is very frightening.

You only need to look back 100 years ago to see how devastating that was to communities across the world. No-one really knows how many people died then. The figures in the parliamentary report on that Spanish influenza pandemic say maybe 50 million. A lot of people in Australia died from it—soldiers coming home from war, people impacted in ways that we forgot about. We did not really put to the front of our minds that we might have a pandemic that would have the impact that this one has had. Well, we have, and we have really struggled as a community to deal with it. Vaccinations absolutely took the forefront as soon as vaccines became available, and they have been successful in reducing the severity of the disease for most people.

Late last year we passed legislation in this Parliament to create much more transparency, to take away the decision-making from the chief health officer alone and make him only a part of the story. We have a Pandemic Declaration Accountability and Oversight Committee, recently established and beginning to start its work, looking at the orders to see that the orders comply with the legislation that was passed last year.

There is an Independent Pandemic Management Advisory Committee just about to be established. That will be a panel of experts who will additionally be there to advise the government and our community about what they see as the best way forward and advise, no doubt, on measures that governments are taking and how effective they might be. I think we are all waiting keenly to see the appointment of that committee to work with other committees in our community, to work with government and to increase the transparency that has not existed in the past and which is now becoming apparent. As more and more opportunities are being put before the Victorian community to hear from experts, they will come to understand better why decisions are being made and why orders are being put in place in the way they are. And I think it will also lead to much more discussion about what is needed as we go forward. Do we need to have some of the things we have still got? What is a timely way to retire some of the orders that may exist?

These are all steps that are yet to be taken and will be taken, but we have a motion before us today that requires a decision today, and in the absence of any compelling reasons to change from that I will continue to support the motion.