Under fire for a slow vaccine rollout, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said more vaccine supply was not going to ensure New South Wales gets out of a five-week lockdown, but what was needed was an effective, properly enforced lockdown.

Turnbull said the Australian government had failed to buy enough vaccines, only securing a plentiful supply of AstraZeneca shots though there was considerable vaccine hesitancy over that vaccine and not enough other shots had been bought.

“It’s the biggest failure of public administration I can recall,” Turnbull, who served as prime minister from 2015-2018 before being ousted by Morrison in a party-room coup.

“It was a colossal failure and the problem is you can’t wind the clock back and fix what should have been done last year.”

“The very reason we are locked down — which is so frustrating when so many other parts of the world are opening up — is simply because our government failed to buy enough vaccines,” he told the BBC.

With only about 16% of Australians aged over 16 years so far fully vaccinated, the country’s main drug regulator on the weekend changed its recommendation to encourage wider take-up of the AstraZeneca vaccine.