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

I rise to speak to One Nation's legislation to end the pandemic of discrimination against Australians who stood for the right to refuse COVID-19 vaccinations. One Nation first introduced similar legislation in 2021. It was when parliament sittings were being conducted remotely and when the untested jabs were being rolled out while lockdowns were being imposed. It was when bureaucrats and elected representatives deliberately trampled all over the democratic rights of the Australian people. It was when discrimination against those who stood for the right to choose vaccination was at its worst. It was so bad and so pervasive that the Senate even refused to record One Nation's votes on our own legislation because we had the temerity to do what they should have done from the beginning.

One Nation introduced this updated version of the COVID-19 Vaccination Status (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill 2022 in November 2022. Here we are now, debating it in 2024, and discrimination against people who refuse vaccinations continues even today. Australians who stand for the right to choose vaccination are ordinary Australians. They are doctors, nurses and paramedics caring for our health. They are police officers enforcing law and keeping us safe. They are soldiers, sailors and aviators defending our sovereignty. They are people who work alongside us in an office, in a factory, at a mine, at a farm or in a shop. They are volunteers helping their communities. They are people in line with us at Centrelink, and they are people sitting next to us in corporate boardrooms. They are people who live next door, down the street, across town and interstate. They are people: born here and overseas; Indigenous and non-Indigenous; men and women; and adults and children. They are our people. They are our fellow citizens. They are Australians just like you and me with families, mortgages, worries, hopes and dreams. They are no different from anyone else.

The pandemic of discrimination which was unleashed upon our fellow Australians took many forms. They were demonised not only in our own country but internationally by elected governments and unelected health bureaucrats, a message amplified by a disturbingly compliant and complacent media. They were physically beaten by police for protesting vaccine mandates and hair-trigger lockdowns, destroying their families, jobs, businesses and the economy. They were attacked in parliaments by their very own elected representatives.

Many of these people, thousands upon thousands, lost their jobs and their livelihoods, with little or no prospect on the horizon, and many of them are still denied employment in their fields today because they, like me, would not allow that crap to be injected into their body. They are still being punished by bureaucracies and government ministers who will never forgive them for not merely submitting to the jabs. These include vital frontline workers in critical fields like law enforcement, public health, the Defence Force and emergency services, all of which are short of skilled workers today. COVID-19 vaccine mandates are still in place in many jurisdictions, despite the virus having become endemic in the population. It is nothing less than petty, vindictive discrimination and naked vaccine coercion more than one year after the pandemic has been effectively over.

However, two particular vaccine mandates are no longer in place. In February this year, the Supreme Court of Queensland ruled them illegal on the grounds that they breached the human rights of the police and nurses on whom they were imposed. That has been One Nation's position on the vaccine mandates all along. The vaccine mandates' discrimination and coercion were not only a fundamental breach of the basic human right to choose; they were a breach of the Australian Constitution. I draw senators' attention to section 51(xxiiiA) of the Constitution—which I have done on numerous occasions—which says parliament can make laws with respect to:

The provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription) …

What were the vaccine mandates if not civil conscription forced upon the Australian people due to the coronavirus? That is why the Prime Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, could not mandate it. He was gutless and he knew he couldn't do it, and that's why he handed it over to the premiers to force it on the people and businesses. He knew he was going against the Constitution.

I also note the valedictory speech of former New South Wales premier Dominic Perrottet last week. Perrottet became the Premier at the height of the pandemic, in October 2021. In his speech last week he said:

… if the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as it is now mostly accepted, the law should have left more room for respect of freedom. Vaccines saved lives but, ultimately, mandates were wrong. People's personal choices should not have cost them their jobs. When I became Premier, we removed them—or the ones we could—but this should have happened faster. If a pandemic comes again, we need to get a better balance, encouraging people to take action whilst at the same time protecting people's fundamental liberty.

I'd have a lot more respect for the man if he had articulated and upheld those basic democratic principles when he had the power to do so.

A mandate is still in place for NSW Health workers, and those firefighters who refused to be jabbed are still being refused work even now, long after their counterparts have not, since December 2021, been forced to have the jabs. I believe the same is happening with the firefighters in Victoria, unless things have changed. I can hear the bureaucrats and the politically elected minions saying: 'Thou shalt not disobey us. Do as you are told.' It was the unelected bureaucrats driving the pandemic response that trampled our human rights, not elected officials. This was coordinated and orchestrated on a global scale.

The rushed COVID-19 vaccines, which cost Australian taxpayers an eye-watering—get this one—$18 billion to buy, not only proved ineffective in preventing infection and transmission. It cost us $18 billion to strip people of their human rights and force them to have a vaccine against their will. How much of that $18 billion went back over to Japan or to these big pharmaceutical companies that pushed a vaccine that was not tried, tested or proven? The evidence is very clear now. These untried and untested medicines caused immense harm to many thousands of Australians and to millions across the world. The Therapeutic Goods Administration reported more than 144,000 adverse reactions in Australia—an astronomical amount compared to other vaccines—and the evidence is clear that there were a great deal more.

More experts are now speaking up about the lifelong impact on human health of these experimental jabs. Young men across the world are experiencing heart problems, mainly myocarditis and pericarditis. Not only are women's menstrual cycles being disrupted but we have more miscarriages and birth defects happening in our society—but no-one wants to own up to anything, do they? There are far fewer kidney transplant procedures taking place due to a sudden shortage of healthy kidneys, and there is an unexplained spike in deaths in Australia and around the world that are not related to getting the virus. On top of that, I was also informed that we now have a rise in unknown cancer rates. Cancers that were not very common are on the rise as well.

To those people that have had this vaccine, I am sorry to tell you that you've compromised your body and compromised your health. One cardiologist said that by having the jab you've compromised your heart, 100 per cent. This is what the government has done to you. This is what the bureaucrats have done to you. You were led like sheep to the slaughter to have this vaccination against your will. If you wanted to have the vaccine, that was your choice. But people were forced to have the vaccine or they would lose their jobs. That's what I am angry about and that's what needs to be exposed here. People's liberty and their rights were stripped from them.

I said at the beginning of the vaccine rollout that I would not put that shit into my body, as did many other Australians, but they had no choice. It turns out they were definitely onto something. Refusing the mandates may have saved their lives. Bureaucrats in Australia have been indemnified against the consequences of imposing these harmful mandates. That needs to be reversed. Australians are demanding accountability for being forced to accept vaccinations proven to be harmful to their health. We must unpack the entire Australian response to the pandemic. We must see the health advice which led to these mandates and who provided it. We must act before the World Health Organization's proposed pandemic treaty is imposed on the world.

The only way to do this is by following One Nation's policy to establish a comprehensive royal commission into the management of the COVID-19 pandemic by all Australian governments. They won't do it because, at the time, we had a Liberal-National party government and we had state Labor governments, so, you see, they won't want to put a noose around their own necks. That's why this royal commission will never happen, because they know they're both guilty of it. For Christ's sake, the people want answers. The people want someone to stand up and say, 'I got it wrong.' Dominic Perrottet did it, but he is out of office now. At least he was edging towards it. Why can't we have the same backbone in some of the members of this parliament and our leaders of this nation? Premiers—whoever—and the former Prime Minister, please be upfront with the Australian people. If you're not upfront now, when will be the next time that you force this on the Australian people? When will be the next time that you listen to health officials from somewhere around the world saying, 'You've got to force this on the people'?

Until we know how to deal with this properly, we're not going to move forward with this. The people are demanding answers. The mental illnesses that it has left people with are unbelievable. People have been left with numerous health issues. I'm pulled up all the time by people with health issues who had the vaccine, and I say, 'Don't have any more.'

You couldn't see your loved ones—even in aged-care homes. Unless you had the vaccine, you couldn't see your people in aged care. They were dying. They were distraught because they couldn't see their families and they didn't know what was happening.

How many people in good health have keeled over, dead, in their 40s and 50s due to heart failure? How many have died? I've heard of former Olympians and other people in good health that have, all of a sudden, died from heart attacks. Isn't it amazing! A lot of these people died and no autopsy was done. It was all hidden and buried. We don't want to tell people. An inquiry that One Nation got up had Pfizer and Moderna there and they said, 'Oh, no. No-one was forced.' What a load of rubbish. And why did the government indemnify these pharmaceutical companies? Why were they indemnified? Here we were giving vaccinations to people that weren't tried, tested or proven. I'll keep saying that. It was only 10 months prior to that. Any vaccinations given to people usually go through a period of about eight, maybe 10 or 18 years. They need to be properly tested. Yet this was not properly tested. A batch of this stuff actually killed people. Every batch that was manufactured was not tested. That was the problem.

I am going to keep going on and on about this until I'm a pain in your backside, which I don't care, until the people get answers and until the people get a royal commission into this. I may not have the balance of power this time around, but I hope that people vote for One Nation at the next time election so that we get the balance of power. We will use that balance of power to force a royal commission for the people to have their say. That is what is dearly needed.

One Nation is the only party that's fighting for this. I take my hat off to Senator Rennick, Senator Antic and Senator Canavan, who have also stood up for this. There are very few of us here. And Senator Babet is also standing up for this. I take my hat off to them. I respect them for standing up for their values and principles. They know it's wrong. To you, the people, we're fighting for you. But the rest of the people in this place couldn't give a damn about you or your future or your health—nothing! You're going to have to suffer until you throw them out at the next election.