Scott Morrison has resisted calls to make rapid antigen tests (RATs) free across the country as he insists the health system can manage the “very different virus” of the Omicron variant.
Despite growing pressure to provide free tests more widely – including to vulnerable and low-income groups – the prime minister said subsidised tests would remain limited to people who were close contacts with symptoms.
“We’re now in a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free,” Morrison told Channel 7’s Sunrise program on Monday.
“When someone tells you they want to make something free, someone’s always going to pay for it, and it’s going to be you.”
However, he said the government was finalising arrangements to provide concessional access to the tests with costs split 50-50 with the states.
He also said that the government’s policy on subsidised tests sent a clear message to the private market that “they can now go and stock their shelves with confidence that they won’t be undercut by the government.”
The Pharmacy Guild and the Australian Medical Association have both criticised the federal government’s handling of the switch to rapid antigen testing as Australians struggle to access the take-home kits from the private market.
Last Thursday, national cabinet agreed to change the testing regime for close and casual contacts, switching to a reliance on rapid antigen tests as the country’s PCR testing centres became overwhelmed by demand.
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, criticised the government for failing to secure enough RATs, accusing Morrison of again offering “too little too late”.
“This has been an example of something that has characterised Scott Morrison’s prime ministership. He identifies a problem only after it becomes a crisis, and then he doesn’t act. He just seems to blame someone else,” Albanese said at a press conference in Newcastle on Monday.
“The government has told people to not go and get tested, but to test themselves with a rapid antigen test that isn’t available, and that isn’t affordable. This is a public policy failure the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country before.”
He said that at the “very least”, tests should be made freely available to people who could not afford them.
The health minister, Greg Hunt, said the government was in the process of securing more RATs and 100m would come into Australia over the next two months. He criticised Labor for suggesting the tests should be freely available.
“If there were an unconstrained flow of completely unpriced products – so if there was an infinite supply to an infinite number of people, then, of course, that demand couldn’t be met,” Hunt said.
“The common sense of providing an infinite supply of free goods somehow has been lost in this discussion.”
He said it would be up to the states to decide if they wanted to forgo GST revenue on the sale of the rapid antigen tests, as had occurred with women’s sanitary products.
New South Wales recorded 20,794 new Covid cases on Monday, with Victoria recording 8,577 and Queensland 4,249. Experts warned the health system faced being overwhelmed, but Morrison also urged people not to focus on case numbers.
“The key point I think we’ve all got to come to terms with is we’ve gear-changed with Omicron,” he later told Channel 9.
“So the requirements for testing, the requirements for isolation, all of these things have changed because Omicron we now know is about 75% less virulent, less severe than the Delta variant.”
“So we’re now dealing with a very different virus and so we’ve really got to change the way we think about it, and that’s why talking about case numbers now is really not the point.”
He said lockdowns were in the past, rising case numbers were part of the “new phase of the pandemic” and those in hospital were most likely to be unvaccinated or infected with the Delta strain.
