Dear Prime Minister,

We write to you urging the Federal Government to provide free Rapid Antigen Tests to all Australians and ensure the supply of these vital health tools is fixed during these difficult days of the pandemic.

Rapid Antigen Tests are vital to ensure people can safely get on with their lives – whether that be to attend work, spend time with family or visit vulnerable settings.

But there is a nationwide crisis because Rapid Tests are impossible to find and if you can find them, they are too costly.

Unlike countries like the UK, which provide rapid tests for free to anyone who needs them, your Government has only offered to make them free for a select select number of Australians.

For the vast majority of families who don’t qualify for this, rapid tests simply are impossible to find and expensive.

Making rapid tests free and widely available for all would mean that we could go about our lives with greater safety and certainty, and it would lessen the burden on our healthcare system and our costlier PCR testing system.

Australians have held up their end of the bargain throughout this pandemic, from staying home to getting vaccinated, and now trying to get tested, but are paying the consequences of your failure to plan and your short sighted policy decisions.

Australians need you to do better.

For goodness sake, this is a pandemic and you are choosing to scrimp on the very tools that can help diagnose and slow the spread of this awful virus.

We call on you to make Rapid Antigen Tests free and accessible with immediate urgency.

Yours sincerely

Josh Burns and concerned residents of Macnamara