Senate votes down bill to protect Australians from discrimination based on Covid vaccination status
Senate votes down bill to protect Australians from discrimination based on Covid vaccination status
Labor said mandatory vaccines are 'voluntary' and labelled vaccine concerns 'conspiracy theories'
Today, the Labor Government and the Greens signalled their ongoing support for medical discrimination, voting down a bill to prevent discrimination based on Covid vaccination status.
The vote comes after former New South Wales Premier Dominique Perrottet admitted last week that Covid vaccine mandates were “wrong.”
The COVID-19 Vaccination Status (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill 2022 was tabled by Senator Pauline Hanson, who has been a vocal opponent of Covid vaccine mandates from the outset.
Senator Hanson’s party, One Nation, has previously tabled bills to prevent Covid vaccine mandates and to amend the Fair Work Act to prevent employment discrimination on the grounds of Covid vaccination status, but they were not successful.
Covid vaccines were mandated during the pandemic as a condition of work, travel, participation in social life, and access to family members in care in every state and territory of Australia.
Though most of the mandates have been retired for the time being, Covid vaccination is still a requirement for some professions and medical procedures, and Australia’s political and bureaucratic leadership has generally indicated that mandates are on the table for future pandemics.
In a statement made on X after the vote, Senator Hanson said,
“This bill would have protected Australians from discrimination based on COVID-19 vaccination status across Australia, including in employment, education, accommodation, and services.
“It would have applied to the Commonwealth, States, Territories, and non-government entities, ensuring individuals are not unfairly treated due to their vaccination status.
“It would have protected free movement within and between States and given parents greater power to protect their children from vaccination coercion.
“This bill would have upheld Australians' rights and freedoms against government overreach and abuse.”
In a charged speech (above), Senator Hanson railed for 15 minutes about the need to balance human and civil rights and vaccine safety with public health imperatives.
For a moment, it appeared as though the bill had passed, as Labor sided with Aye. However, Senate Whip Anne Urquhart (Labor) quickly communicated that Labor had voted in error, asking for a revote.
The final vote was 25 Ayes to 32 Noes, with One Nation, Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party, and the Coalition voting Aye, and Labor, the Greens, and independent Senator Fatima Payman voting No.
Independent Senators Jaqui Lambie, Tammy Tyrell, David Pocock, David Van and Lidia Thorpe were absent from the chamber.
During speaking time, Senator Urquhart delivered a monologue best described as a recitation of faith-based Scientism dogmas with a touch of gaslighting.
Senator Urquhart called One Nation’s anti-discrimination bill a “stunt,” declared that Covid vaccination is “voluntary” despite Australia’s world-famous coercive mandates, and characterised Senator Hanson’s stated concerns over civil rights and vaccine safety as “conspiracy theories and fringe agendas.”
In her short speech, Senator Urquhart stated twice that Covid vaccinations are necessary to prevent severe illness and death, adding a third specific claim that, “Vaccination has been critical in reducing hospitalisations and admissions to intensive care units (ICU) and deaths.”
Senator Urquhart lauded Covid vaccines for having been “instrumental in allowing society to reopen both socially and economically,” and said that, “we shouldn’t focus on conspiracy theories and fringe agendas,” but should rather focus on getting everyone vaccinated in line with the experts’ recommendations for their age and health status.
These are oft-repeated dogmas that require unpacking.
“The government’s position on Covid-19 vaccination is that it is voluntary, as are all vaccinations in Australia.”
As previously discussed on this Substack, this doublespeak official position of the Labor Government is simply false. It should concern Australians that our Government feels at liberty to abuse language in this way.
The word “voluntary” means free choice with no external compulsion.
Had Covid vaccine mandates not been in place, those who wished to voluntarily get vaccinated for health reasons could have done so. However, “external compulsion” in the form of vaccine mandates was in place for at least the first two jabs, and in some states three, and they remain in place for some professions.
This is why when you ask average, healthy and not elderly Australians why they got vaccinated against Covid, they typically say it was to protect a family member (based on misinformation about transmission propagated by health bureaucrats and politicians), to keep their job, or to travel.
Survey data supports these anecdotes. An independent survey of over 26,000 Australians found that thousands of Australians felt “extremely pressured” to get vaccinated against Covid, with over half of vaccinated respondents saying they got the jabs mainly to keep their jobs, and not for medical reasons. 11% of respondents said protection from Covid was a main reason for vaccination. (The survey was subject to selection bias and so the results are not representative of the whole Australian population).
In Western Australia, it is legal for the government to forcibly vaccinate you against your will if the Police Commissioner decides that it is necessary under a state of emergency.
Vaccination under these conditions is the opposite of the meaning of “voluntary.”
It’s not just Covid vaccination policy that is coercive, either. The Australian Government withholds tax-payer funded family assistance payments from parents who do not get their kids vaccinated according to the National Immunisation Program schedule on time, and in most states and territories, unvaccinated children cannot attend early education or care services.
These policies obviously exert more coercive pressure on socioeconomically disadvantaged families, although the children of wealthy families able to forgo the family assistance payments will still be socially excluded until they are of school age.
“Covid-19 vaccinations protect people in Australia against serious illness and death,” and, “Vaccination has been critical in reducing hospitalisations and admissions to intensive care units (ICU) and deaths.”
The claim that Covid vaccinations protect people in Australia against serious illness and death remains unsupported by any available Australian dataset or report.
To prove this claim, you would need hospitalisation, ICU and all cause mortality (ACM) data stratified by age, comorbidities and vaccination status. At present, no such data set has been published publicly, and when I have attempted to obtain linked data of this nature under Freedom of Information (FOI) from states and territory governments (including Western Australia, the Northern Territory, New South Wales, and Tasmania) I have been told that no such documents exist. Furthermore, my requests to create such a document have been denied.
The next best available data for measuring Covid vaccine effectiveness are the fortnightly reports that the New South Wales (NSW) Health used to publish showing hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths by vaccination status.
At first, the reports appeared to show a benefit to Covid vaccination, but this trend quickly reversed, with the risk of severe illness positively correlating with each successive booster.
Rates of death between the vaccinated and unvaccinated were not significantly different overall, although those with four or more doses were twice as likely to die with Covid than the less vaccinated or unvaccinated. (Soon after, NSW Health stopped publishing the fortnightly reports.)
However, because NSW Health never published linked data stratifying age x vaccination status, the confounder of age (Simpons’s paradox) could never be ruled out, and so the appearance of negative vaccine effectiveness could not be confirmed.
NSW Health has since gone to excessive lengths to avoid releasing the necessary linked age x vaccination status data that prove vaccine effectiveness in an Australian population, consistently denying FOI requests and even claiming in a tribunal hearing that the data were never saved, but were deleted (an astonishing deviation from standard record keeping practice if true).
Claims that Covid vaccines saved almost 20,000 lives during the early Omicron wave in NSW alone splashed across headlines earlier this year after a modelling study by Victorian researchers from RMIT and Monash universities was published in Plos One, but neither the peer reviewers nor the reporters noticed key problems, including that the data used by the researchers were the incomplete and confounded NSW Health data.
Australia’s peak actuarial body, the Actuaries Institute, uncritically used this modelling study to estimate that Covid vaccination in Australia saved approximately 50,000 lives, in its latest paper on the impacts of Covid on Australian excess mortality.
However, the authors state that “the results obtained in this study may be affected by potentially confounding factors as age and comorbidity,” the two most important predictors of Covid severity. While the study was restricted to the 50+ age group, “lack of data availability prevented analysis of finer age groups.”
Furthermore, in this study, anyone within 21 days of their first dose of Covid vaccination was categorised as ‘no effective dose’, meaning deaths occurring within the first 21 days of vaccination would be not be attributed to the vaccinated group.
The study also confused case fatality rate (CFR) for infection fatality rate (IFR), thus overestimating the mortality risk of the virus in the population. More problems with the study are discussed by Alison Bevege in her Substack article, ‘FAKE NEWS: Study does NOT show covid gene-vaccines "saved nearly 20,000 lives in NSW alone".’
Covid deaths skyrocketed after our governments coerced everyone into getting the jabs, but we are supposed to take this flawed modelling study as proof that it ‘would have been worse’ without the vaccines.
Another small study of South Australian (SA) Health data by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded research group, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), claimed to show that the unvaccinated were five times more likely to die of Covid. But the study was based on incomplete data, and did not control for the age-related mortality risk, or comorbidities. The only people under the age of 60 to die were vaccinated, and using hospitalisation as a normalising baseline, people with three doses died at three times the rate of the unvaccinated.
The above discussion only takes into account the supposed benefits of the Covid vaccines. As it stands, the Australian Government has no idea of the true rate of injuries and deaths associated with the vaccines, and so cannot quantify the benefits in relation to the risks in the Australian population.
Covid vaccines “have been instrumental in allowing society to reopen both socially and economically.”
Only because the policies of the state, territory and federal governments made it so.
Australian politicians often speak glowlingly of the Covid vaccines’ mythical abilities to grant Australians the freedoms that our own leaders deprived us of. Other countries didn’t require special rituals to restore basic rights. They just didn’t take them away in the first place.
Though they deny it now, our politicians and health bureaucrats outright stated or strongly implied that the whole point of mandates was to prevent, and then to limit, the spread of the virus. You can see below how that worked out.
It was on this point that former NSW Premier Dominique Perrottet admitted that Covid vaccine mandates were a mistake, during his final speech to the NSW Parliament last week.
"If the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as is now mostly accepted, the law should have left more room for respect of freedom," said Perrottet.
"Vaccines saved lives, but ultimately, mandates were wrong. People's personal choices shouldn't have cost them their jobs."
Regardless, the issue of transmission is a red herring. Medical ethics require informed consent, and human rights conventions prohibit coercing populations into medical experiments (phase three of most of the Covid vaccine trials only ended in 2023).
Efforts to raise vaccine safety concerns are a “stunt,” and “We shouldn’t focus on conspiracy theories and fringe agendas.”
Is there anything more discrediting to a government than characterising concerns of its constituents as “conspiracy theories” and “fringe agendas?”
Labor politicians often reflexively use the conspiracy theory trope to discredit opposition to its policies rather than engaging in meaningful debate - it’s a juvenile tactic that seems to be a particular problem in the culture of the party.
There was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responding to questions about the Voice referendum by likening them to Q Anon conspiracy theories or the faking of the moon landing.
There was Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen calling climate policy skeptic and Covid vaccine injured advocate Senator Gerard Rennick's social media feed “a cacophony of conspiracy theories" at a National Press Club speech in Canberra last month.
When challenged by Senator Rennick, he doubled down, stating that “Government agencies should absolutely be scrutinised. But not by cookers and conspiracy theorists spreading disinformation for their selfish political purposes.”
And there was Communications Minister Michelle Rowland warning that there is a risk that her department’s proposed misinformation bill “could be perceived as a form of censorship,” because of the “rise in conspiracy theories” online (implying the censorship criticism is therefore illegitimate).
Of course, none of the vaccine safety concerns raised in Senator Hanson’s speech in Parliament today are theory to Australia’s Covid vaccine injured and families of the deceased.
It is an indisputable fact that Covid vaccine mandates are a form of civil conscription into a death and injury lottery for the purported collective good.
The only dispute is over the odds of death and injury.
This is one of the strange developments in parties that used to represent working class interests but now represent what are colloquially called ‘woke’ interests, shaped by the luxury beliefs of the middle class and elites - the willingness to gaslight and marginalise certain victim groups in the name of protecting the interests of other, favoured victim groups.
If it makes left-leaning readers feel any better, Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John supported the death lottery mandates but called for the federal Covid vaccine injury compensation scheme to be expanded and extended past its scheduled end date of 30 September 2024.
Senator Pauline Hanson has been in politics for a long time. When I was a middle class public school-going teenager, she was a joke to us. Her ineloquent style, her willingness to voice unfashionable opinions, and her humble fish and chip shop beginnings were perfect fodder for comedy sketches and memetic radio hits.
Yet Senator Hanson is one of very few Australian politicians who have taken a stand on informed consent and medical discrimination, and that is no joke.
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Brilliant work, absolutely devastating logic
"However, Senate Whip Anne Urquhart (Labor) quickly communicated that Labor had voted in error, asking for a revote." . . Oh I had to laugh out loud at my mental image of Labor's backbench faces realising they'd utterly muffed their directive, and having to be hauled back-on-track, void of humility or conscience.
Great article ++. Keep chipping away.