Page 3553 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 23 November 2021
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But it is all underpinned by the success of our public health response which, on all of the metrics—whether that is number of infections per 100,000 people, number of hospitalisations per 100,000 people, number of intensive care presentations per 100,000 people, number of deaths per 100,000 people, number of vaccinations per 100,000 people—demonstrates the success of the public health response in the ACT when benchmarked against other states and territories in this country and indeed against other jurisdictions, small, medium and large, around the world. And what underpins our successful economic recovery is the strength of that public health response.
I hope by Christmas the remaining 10,000 or so Canberrans who have had their first dose of a vaccine will be able to have concluded their primary vaccination course, be fully vaccinated, so that our 99.9 per cent first-dose rate is matched by as close to 99.9 per cent fully vaccinated. It is sitting at 97.3 per cent today. We are growing at about 0.1 per cent each day. There are about 10,000 to go.
Then we roll into the booster program which we must deliver in big numbers ahead of next winter. Clearly the lived experience in the Northern Hemisphere is that winter is very problematic as far as COVID transmission is concerned. So we must get ahead of this. It would seem for the first time in the Australian vaccination program that vaccine supply will not be the inhibitor of the successful delivery of the booster program. That is fundamental to our ongoing economic recovery, as we have seen very clearly the devastating impacts of losing control of the public health situation not only on public health but on economic outcomes, be that business profits or government budgets.
Encouragingly—and members may or may not have got across the detail of the September quarter budget update—and pleasingly, the economic recovery that we are seeing across the key metrics is also now flowing into the government’s own-source revenue. That was an encouraging set of data for the first quarter. But the first quarter does not make a fiscal year. We need to see what happens in quarters 2, 3 and 4.
With that, I commend the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate appropriation. It is indeed diverse and covers a range of important areas of investment for the territory government. I thank all my ministerial colleagues for their contributions and indeed all members for their contributions to this section of the budget debate and commend the appropriation to the Assembly.
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
Debate (on motion by Mr Gentleman) adjourned to the next sitting.
Adjournment
Motion (by Mr Gentleman) proposed:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
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