You’ve got to have the preconditions there, which is keeping Australians safe is the first priority.
And that means getting quarantine right, getting vaccination right. We should be, as well, producing our own mRNA vaccines. We should have started that process last year.
And one of the things that concerns me about this budget is there’s lots of Band-Aids coming out to fix the government’s political problems in the lead-up to an election.
But there’s no reform. There’s no structural reform. And a whole range of weaknesses in our economy have been identified during the pandemic.
We didn’t have enough personal protective equipment. We didn’t have enough ventilators. We need a plan to actually build more here, to have advanced manufacturing here.
And we’ve outlined that through our National Reconstruction Fund.
The government, with all the announcements and all the money being thrown around, with a trillion dollars of debt, don’t have a reform agenda.