COVID-19 vaccination
Mr TILLEY (Benambra) (09:51): At what point will this Labor government remove the COVID-19 mandates that prevent people from working and in doing so ease critical staff shortages across a range of industries? We need people back at work, not on welfare. Let us be brutally honest now: the big stick that this Labor government used to get people vaccinated is now broken. Victorians voluntarily got to 95 per cent vaccinated with two doses; now with three doses we have stalled at a small 67 per cent. Personally, I am triple vaccinated, but many others increasingly are vaccine hesitant. No amount of vaccine seems capable of stopping you from being infected or passing COVID-19 to someone else. For some the vaccine saves lives, but for others the current strain is a head cold and seven days iso, which is about four days too much. As businesses reduce hours, health services struggle with staff shortages and casual relief teachers are almost non-existent, we still treat this highly skilled albeit unvaccinated labour force as taboo. I nearly choked when I read the government’s claim the vaccinated economy was dead because you did not have to sign in to a cafe anymore. The reality is it is still very much alive. We need a road map that returns the unvaccinated to work, and in the most vulnerable settings the plan should be about finding meaningful tasks that ease the burden on these services.