Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] COVID has had a huge impact on people's lives and businesses, and we've had to pick up the pieces and learn as we're going along. It's been impacting on the Australian community for the last year and a half. It's cost us hundreds of billions of dollars from the government propping up businesses and those who have lost their jobs, and it's still impacting to this day. We've seen state border closures.

The Prime Minister got up a little over a week ago and said, 'Your circumstances in your state will not change or be any worse than they are today.' Less than 24 hours later, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk shut down the whole state. In the south-east corner, 11 local government authorities were shut down and people are in lockdown. You haven't got any cases of COVID in a lot of these areas. It is the south-east corner, mainly in Brisbane, that's been affected by it. The Prime Minister says, 'You will not be any worse off.' Well, that didn't even last 24 hours. I say that the Prime Minister has lost control of the borders here in Australia, allowing the premiers to shut down at their whim. It has been up to the taxpayers of this nation to prop up businesses, let alone what it's doing to people mentally and the impact it's having on jobs. Businesses are going under. You talk about COVID deaths. Yes, they are occurring, but we had more deaths from the flu in one year than we have had from COVID.

The government are talking about a vaccine passport, which concerns a lot of Australians. I've had a lot of calls with regard to this. People don't want to be controlled by governments and told whether they can hold a job. I have heard from people who have applied for government jobs and are denied the job if they haven't had a vaccination. The people of Australia are concerned about having vaccinations. The fact is that the government cannot give them any guarantee about the health repercussions the vaccinations will have on them in two or five years down the track. These vaccinations have been rushed into our community for fear of the spread of a pandemic. The government can't even indemnify the people who've had the vaccinations and have died from them, but we indemnify the companies who make the vaccines and the doctors who give the vaccination. But we don't care about the people.

People need assurances. I remember that when we did medicinal cannabis for production in Australia I asked the health department whether, in the interim, they would allow it to come in from Israel and Canada until we started our own production. The answer was: 'No. It's not tried and tested in Australia. We can't allow this into our community.' It had been in Israel for 20 years. It had been proven in that country that it did not have an impact on the people. We couldn't allow that into Australia, but we are giving to people of vaccine that has been out on the market for less than 12 months. We know of people who have been affected by their vaccination.

Minister, in light of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have gone out, propping up these businesses throughout the country, which is due to the premiers whim of a hat and a few cases up and down the country, at what point are you going to actually take control, rein in the premiers and stop them locking down the borders?