Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak regarding the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022. This bill provides a perfect opportunity for our parliament, all of us here, to remedy a great injustice. That injustice is the injustice of vaccine mandates. For much too long in our country hardworking Australians have been discriminated against by employers, by authorities, by everyone really. These employees are dedicated and highly skilled Australians, but you know what's happened? They've been shut out of careers that they love. That's what's happened—just completely shut out from careers they have given long, dedicated years of service to. As an example, nurses, teachers, firefighters and volunteers. I'm sure you've all seen in the past where volunteers weren't able to go and fill sandbags because they weren't vaccinated. Ridiculous! We've created division amongst our people, an unneeded division, which has torn apart family members, friends, colleagues, even strangers.

The Australian Human Rights Commission states:

The guiding human rights principles for considering measures taken to advance public health are:

Mandatory vaccination policies, and the accompanying use of vaccine passports and certificates, have significant implications for freedom of movement and association, access to everyday goods and services, privacy and autonomy, and equity and discrimination.

Vaccine passports and certificates are more likely to be consistent with human rights principles when they are used as a tool to ease more burdensome lockdown restrictions and improve public health outcomes.

I ask you all in this place to think long and hard about the words that I just quoted directly from our Human Rights Commission. Mandates are an egregious abuse of basic human rights, and this bill provides an opportunity to prohibit mandates once and for all. Why have mandates been put in place? In the name of science, apparently.

We were told that mRNA injections through mandates were necessary to stop transmission and to end the pandemic. That's what we were told. We were told that it would save lives and it was the only solution. That's what was said.

Now, a study funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published in The Lancet found that the level of protection from past infection is at least equivalent to if not greater than two doses of mRNA vaccine. I use the term 'vaccine' loosely. These COVID vaccines have potentially dangerous side effects, and I keep harping on about this every chance I get. You've all heard me talk about it before. As Dr Marty Makary, Professor of Surgery and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University, said in sworn testimony before the United States House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic: 'Myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the COVID vaccine than after COVID infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.'

Debate interrupted.