Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This motion from the party that used to be known as the Labor Party, shows that the Labor Party have completely deserted protecting workers' rights. They no longer give two hoots about the rights of workers to work or the rights of labourers to work. It is no longer a labour party. They should get it over with, change their name to the 'woke party' and get it done, because they are not representing labourers, they are not representing workers and they're not even representing unions.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU, just a few months ago put out a joint statement with the Business Council of Australia opposing mandatory vaccinations. This a direct quote from the Business Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions:

We believe that for the overwhelming majority of Australians your work or workplace should not fundamentally alter the voluntary nature of vaccination.

I concur with that wholeheartedly. People in this country should have the right to work and provide for their families—not according to the Labor Party. Just so I'm clear—and it reflects my view—the statement goes on to say:

Employers and unions recognise that for a small number of high-risk workplaces there may be a need for all workers in a workplace to be vaccinated to protect community health and safety.

I believe that too. That's why this morning I recognised that in my contribution. Imposing mandates across almost our whole economy, which is occurring in many states, and for all time or potentially in perpetuity, which is also apparent in some states, is a breach of a person's fundamental right to be able to work so that they can provide food on the table for their children. It is outrageous that state governments are doing this.

This motion, though, is also totally incoherent. On the one hand it says that businesses should have the right to refuse entry to people who are unvaccinated and on the other it says, 'We should mandate that anyway.' What? Businesses don't have that right to choose, then? They don't have a right to choose if it's mandated for them by governments. The Labor Party are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They're holding out the hope that somehow businesses would have a choice—they respect choice—but, at the same time, in this motion they are taking away that choice by supporting mandates.

I notice that Senator Watt was saying that vaccine mandates should apply when the health advice says so. By the way, where is this health advice? We never seem to get to see it. It seems to be hidden from all of us mere mortals. What Senator Watt does not explain is how we deal with a situation where health experts disagree and some of them do disagree. Dr Nick Coatsworth who was, until not that long ago, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the Commonwealth government and a highly respected expert in this field, only late last week on 18 November, said:

One of the best decisions ever made by a jurisdiction was @ABarrMLA's determination to avoid differential treatment of unvaccinated Canberrans. No vaccine passports. Just convincing the community and facilitating vaccination. That's the way it's done.

That's pretty clear health advice.

The ACT—Andrew Barr is Canberra's first minister—is an example where there are no vaccination passports and I believe they have the highest vaccination rate in the country. They've done that without any mandating and without people being forced to lose their jobs, at least in a widespread way, again, keeping in mind that, yes, in high-risk health environments that might be required. But they haven't required people to show their medical papers to go to a cafe and they haven't required a retail worker or someone working in a supermarket to get a vaccination just to keep their job, yet they've achieved the result we all want, which is a high vaccination rate.

Where is the evidence that this works? This is a fundamental restriction on people's human rights; surely we can agree with that. Surely someone does have a right to work. We recognise it in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We hear a lot from the Labor and Greens parties about these international treaties that we should comply with. Well, that's in there; it's in the heart of the document that people have a right to work. We're breaching that right. We are restricting that right. If you are going to do so, you'd want to have pretty good evidence that this stuff works, but we have almost zero evidence that it works. Vaccine passport policies are certainly not working overseas. I challenge any other speaker in this debate to provide an example of just one country where vaccine passports have worked.

To be clear: even if the health advice were all in one direction for health passports, which it's not, we cannot give up our responsibility to make decisions on these fundamental issues to people who are expert in one narrow field. These issues are about much more than the coronavirus or health issues alone. They go to fundamental human rights, and therefore it is incumbent on us not to outsource our decision-making and our responsibility to weigh up evidence and advice for the best interests of the Australian people, to protect their rights and to make sure we remain a free country.

I want to read a quote from CS Lewis, who said this many years ago. It was in 1958, but it was quite prescient:

Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists' puppets. … But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.

That is a succinct summary of what we used to consider freedom, in this country and right around Western civilisation. Each individual was sovereign to decide what was important in their lives. It was not for a centralised government to dictate what they should do with their life, their lifestyle or their diet and certainly not with medical procedures, but that is what we're doing here, and the Australian people have worked this out. That's why you see hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and they're not all unvaccinated people. There are plenty of people, like myself, who are vaccinated but who will fight to protect the right of other Australians to make a different decision. There are thousands of people like that. We've never seen protests like this in this country. They've been almost overwhelmingly peaceful, probably the most peaceful protests we've ever seen in this country.

And now we have people wanting to silence fellow Australians. We have the Labor member for Keppel, near where I live, wanting to refer our local mayor to the CCC in Queensland because he had the temerity to vote against the Queensland government's draconian vaccine mandate laws. This behaviour is reprehensible. To try and silence an elected official through threats of referral to corruption-investigating bodies is a low point for the member for Keppel, up there in Central Queensland, and that's quite an achievement for her, based on her previous conduct.

There were over 2,000 people in Yeppoon on the weekend, campaigning against these mandates. I know many of them. I can vouch for the fact that they're not far-Right extremists. They're not radical extremists. They're not 'fringe elements', as the Queensland Deputy Premier tagged them last week. They are upstanding men and women in our community—many of them business owners and many of them involved in voluntary organisations—who are just trying to defend the right of people to earn a living and not be forced to undertake a medical procedure. They do not deserve seeing their own member of parliament in Queensland seeking to bully and silence their mayor from standing up for them. I applaud the work of the Livingston Shire Council, on the Capricorn Coast, last week. They stood up as one and voted unanimously against these vaccine passports.

It's about time that the Queensland Labor government actually listened to the people of Queensland. It's about time they discussed these matters before running off dictates in Brisbane that tell us how we should live up there in Central Queensland. I tell you what: people up there do not want their freedoms taken away. They will not back down on this fight. They will continue to support all of our fellow Central Queenslanders to make their own decisions to work to provide for their family and ensure that we do not lose the free country we were all born in.