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

We see daily evidence of why these cruel, inequitable, selfish and hypocritical lockdowns must end. Lockdowns have long since gone past their use-by date. This week more small businesses have gone to the wall because we have made it a crime for people to work for themselves. A good mate of mine, Michael Trout, lost a brilliant tourism business in Cairns. A cafe owner in Sydney was locked out of his own business because he could not pay the rent, and there are many more heartbreaking stories. Lockdowns have been a boon for big online businesses, but they are the death knell for the small family-run businesses that are the bedrock of our society. Vaccine passports are now being imposed on our health, construction and service workers, while white-collar highly paid professionals have no mandates imposed on them and they get paid the same while working from home. This is the way lockdowns work. The rich wrap themselves in cottonwool and retreat to homes with swimming pools, backyards, gyms and gardens. In the western suburbs a single mum is jailed inside a two-bedroom home while trying to keep her three kids occupied and losing her job and income. Today we learnt at a press conference, attended by about 10 not especially socially distanced journalists, that police are monitoring online church services, presumably in case the delta variant starts to spread on the interwebs. Yet tapings of the reality TV show The Voice have got the green light to go ahead. And, according to the science, the delta variant cannot spread among politicians and the media.

The state has no role in a free society to monitor people's religious activities. Our military should be defending our external borders, not patrolling our internal state boundaries. Every Australian child has the right to go to school, and everyday Australians should not be treated like prisoners and have to be given permission by their wardens to spend one hour outside a day. There is a rebellion brewing within Australia. We have not been a penal colony since 1869, and I know the free people of Australia have no desire to go back to Australia being one.