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

[by video link] As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I am ashamed to say that Australia is at war—at war with state and federal governments. I am appalled that Friday 17 December looms in our state as the official date of segregation between the injected and the un-injected. Two years ago, anyone who had dared suggest such a scenario would have been mocked and labelled a conspiracy theorist. It could never happen in our country. It would have been unthinkable that any Australian political leader would consider segregating based on injection status even as a strategy to deal with COVID under the guise that we can all regain our inherent human right to move freely throughout our country.

Despite Victoria being the world's most locked down jurisdiction, and Victorians until recently suffering under increasingly draconian restrictions, Victoria today has more cases of COVID than it did a year ago. There was neither any science nor any modelling that suggested we could suppress the virus so, instead, governments suppressed and oppressed the people to hide political foolishness, failings and gross mismanagement. What started as a supposed war on COVID became a fear-driven war against the people of Australia to make politicians appear to know what they were doing yet politicians and health bureaucrats making decisions and destroying our lives have not suffered themselves. These privileged positions have remained intact, these people have not lost jobs and are not wondering how the hell to feed their families; instead, the privileged have been comfortably working from home, waiting for the storm to blow over. Our confidence and trust in governments have collapsed because we have been lied to.

The Australian people witnessed sweeping inconsistencies, contradictions and hypocrisy on virus rules and, in this, the Queensland premier excels. After two years, state and federal politicians still do not act with one shared view of what a hotspot is, resulting in thousands of double-injected Queensland residents abandoned for months at huge cost just over the border in New South Wales, unable to return home. The fact that the Queensland premier can hold residents in such low regard is repugnant, disgusting, inhuman.

The Prime Minister's lame pretence to push back against mandatory injections provides little comfort to Australians. It drives scorn, derision and anger. He says the federal government does not mandate COVID injections yet leaves the states and territories to run wild with mandates that gut and make a mockery of informed consent, bodily autonomy and human rights—lies. Federal agencies destroy the primacy and privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. Federal government health data is essential for states to enforce mandates, and the Queensland Premier says her decision to divide and segregate is in line with the spuriously labelled 'national cabinet', a concoction over which the Prime Minister presides.

Our political leaders don't know when to stop hurting the people. Their thirst for personal ease and political control over the masses is their justification for draconian measures shredding privacy and human rights, wreaking havoc with people's lives and mental health, and endorsing segregation based on injection status. The rhetoric throughout COVID has been 'we're all in this together'. The Queensland segregation date of 17 December shows we are not. It's unconscionable that, unless injected, Queenslanders will be barred from social and leisure activities and health services. Is the federal government going to stand by and let the Queensland Premier deny uninjected Queenslanders a restaurant meal, a drink in the pub, a coffee and, despite paying our taxes, medical care except in an emergency? Confidence in the injection should translate into the confidence of being protected, making it unnecessary to marginalise people choosing to remain injection-free. Are people so scared that this logic is lost?

There was an opportunity this week for the government to support Senator Hanson's bill, which outlaws discrimination based on injection status, yet the majority of government senators hid in their offices and did nothing. They're hiding from constituents and scurrying from accountability. The federal government is doing nothing to stop the imminent segregation of the Australian people. To avoid getting hands dirty, enforcement will be outsourced to state police and small-business owners. We need to stop our political leaders dividing us and driving coercive discrimination against our fellow Australians. We need to work together as a nation of Australian people, not state against state in an insane, futile race to suppress and eliminate COVID when what is really being suppressed is the people. People are now taking to the streets, protesting to push back government overreach and restore our freedoms. People know freedom, privacy and human rights have been eroded too much for too long, at huge cost, and with both courage and desperation they march in the streets now. It seems freedom isn't always easy and free. Sometimes it must be fought for. Today we're still fighting for common sense, for our freedom and for our democracy. We want it back.