Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If there's one thing I've learnt in my 3½ years of being a senator it's that, if anyone thinks that this country is being run by the people in this chamber or in the other place, they are kidding themselves. It is run by the bureaucrats. Let's be honest: that's much too nice a term; they're really autocrats.

These people are accountable to no-one. We've been fooled with this Orwellian language that they're an independent statutory authority and, because they're independent, they're going to be pure as driven snow. I don't think I've been to a set of estimates yet in the last 3½ years where I've ever had a bureaucrat actually come out and give me a straight answer. Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of it, so tonight's all about the last set of estimates and the number of lies that were told by Dr John Skerritt. I'm going to go through those lies bit by bit, right now.

The first one is a real doozey. When asked by Senator Roberts whether or not he would apologise to the people who died from the vaccine, Dr Skerritt said that since the beginning of the COVID pandemic more than 10 times as many people had died from paracetamol or Panadol as from adverse events due to COVID vaccines. We checked that out—