Craig Kelly (Hughes, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak on the Major Sporting Events (Indica and Images) Protection and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2021. Specifically, I would like to refer to No. (2) in the amendment moved by the opposition, which says:

(2) calls on the Government to further support Australia's ability to host international sporting events by implementing an effective national quarantine system to ensure COVID-safe travel for sports teams and officials".

That's a very important amendment, because what we have currently in this country is the Australian Open tennis down in Victoria over the summer—one of our great traditional events. But the world's top-rating player, Novak Djokovic, has been banned from coming to Australia. We excluded the best player in the world on the grounds that, as a professional athlete, who survives on his fitness and his health, he has decided that he doesn't want to make it public knowledge whether or not he has submitted himself to a global medical experiment and agree to be injected with a novel, experimental, genetic agent.

Surely that should be his right? But some may argue that this puts the other athletes at risk, that this creates a risk at the workplace. Over the weekend, no less a figure than the surgeon general of Florida, Dr Joseph A Ladapo, MD, PhD, said:

The idea that … vaccine mandates are needed to create safe workplaces is a complete lie.

We've also had Boris Johnson talking about the need for mandatory vaccines. He said:

… it doesn't protect you against catching the disease and it doesn't protect you against passing it on.

If this is what world leaders are saying, if this is what some of the most senior medical people from the US are saying, why are we banning athletes based upon their vaccination status? Surely it should be based upon whether they are COVID -positive or COVID -negative, not upon their vaccination status.

This will show the farcical nature of this policy that we have in Australia. The UK Health Security Agency publishes every week a document called the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report. Last Thursday they published the report for week 42. In that, they compared the number of cases of COVID that are vaccinated and not vaccinated. The argument is that we have to exclude the world's top-ranking tennis player from a major sporting event in Melbourne, the Australian Open, one of the major sporting events in the world, because we think that, because he is not vaccinated, he has a higher risk of having COVID and passing it on. Well, let's have a look at what this data actually says. We know that Djokovic is in his mid-30s—I think 34 years of age. If we look at the report from the UK, the most up-to-date data we have for Europe, in the 30- to 39-year-old age group, from week 38 to week 41 the number of cases amongst the non-vaccinated was 21,726, but the number of cases amongst the so-called fully vaccinated—that is, injected twice, although we know that the term 'fully vaccinated' is slippery; it now may mean extra booster shots, but this is referring to those that have been fully vaccinated under the definition that that is two shots—was 56,004. So there were more than twice as many people with COVID in that age group who were vaccinated compared to those who were not vaccinated.

To make the comparison exact, we've got to look at the percentages. This report also does that. It looks at the rates per 100,000. The rate per 100,000 of people not vaccinated was 751, but the rate for those vaccinated was 27 per cent higher, at 956. So this data shows that those who have been vaccinated actually have a higher rate of COVID infections in that 30- to 40-year-old age bracket than those not vaccinated, and yet we have adopted a policy of excluding those who have been unvaccinated from the Australian Open. This is madness. This is insanity. This is tinfoil hat stuff. This is the stuff of superstition and witchcraft. And yet it is the policy of the Australian government to exclude the world's best athletes from this nation based on a nonsense.

These major sporting events are so important to our economy. We've got many sporting events that attract athletes from around the world. They love to come to Australia for these sporting events. The Australian public loves them. But these events in future are being put at risk by a backward, illogical policy based upon superstition that somehow, if someone is unvaccinated, they have a greater risk than someone that is vaccinated. We are putting the sporting heritage of this nation at risk with this madness, this stupidity, this primitive superstition that we have that has spread through the country. If we, going forward, want to retain the great Australian tradition of sportsmanship, we need to end this. We need to all call it out. It is a nonsense. The idea of excluding athletes from this country based upon their COVID vaccination status must stop. It is illogical, it is contrary to the science and it is contrary to the evidence.

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