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

I move:

That the Senate acknowledges that:

(a) there has been a concerning number of excess deaths in Australia in 2021 and 2022, as evidenced by recent all-cause provisional mortality data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics; and

(b) there is a need for further inquiry and scrutiny as to the reasons for these excess deaths, including why dementia and diabetes have seen significant increases in recent years.

Earlier today, I moved a motion to create a select committee to examine excess deaths in our country. It was voted down by 35 senators in this place whose names will live on in infamy. Statements were made by both major parties as to why it would not be supported. I've got to say the response was as predictable as it was unsatisfactory. Many of us here in this place claim to care about Australians, but by the actions that happened today it doesn't look like we do. The opposition at least expressed concern over the excess deaths, but they are potentially more interested in covering up the mistakes of the past. As for the government: 'Well, don't worry, Australia,' they said. 'It's all being handled already by the institutions we have in place—nothing to see here.' That was the thinly veiled message.

The fact that Australia is right now experiencing its highest mortality rate in over 80 years must be cause for concern and it must be a priority for everyone in this place. It should be front-page news. According to Actuaries Institute figures released earlier this month, Australia experienced an 11 per cent increase in excess deaths in 2022, the greatest number since World War II. It's not all COVID. Only around a third of nearly 23,000 excess deaths, according to the most recent ABS report, have been attributed to COVID-19. The remainder, a truly significant amount of excess mortality, is not recorded as COVID related; in fact, it is largely unexplained. What's more alarming is that the Actuaries Institute states that excess mortality was a significant percentage in all age groups in 2022. So we're seeing significant excess mortality across all age groups, even among young people.

There is an urgent need to examine what is giving rise to this sudden and extraordinary increase in mortality. Australia is a sick country, and we know there isn't a simple solution. It is a complex issue. It requires investigation. Whether it's heart disease, cancer, diabetes or dementia, whether the underlying causes are diet, lifestyle, unexpected consequences of lockdowns or something else, there needs to be an urgent investigation. We must emerge with answers for the Australian people—we must.

When Australian citizens are dying in numbers well beyond expert predictions, at rates not seen in a hundred years, it is appropriate for us to inquire as to the reasons. I don't know any member of parliament who could just shrug off excess deaths or dismiss the need for more investigation. My call earlier today to establish this committee would, at the very least, have given us a better understanding and would have, hopefully, given us a practical way to address what is now a deeply disturbing trend. Like I said before, that call went unheeded by the majority of those in this place. Only a few caring, dedicated senators decided to stand with me, and I thank them for doing so.

We must find answers. We owe it to our family members, to our neighbours and to the people we represent. Imagine if a Boeing 737 crashed. Imagine how tragic that would be. Surely the government would have something to say then? But what if a 737 crashed every two to three days for 11 straight months—131 planes falling out of the sky? That's what we're dealing with here. The data from the ABS clearly shows this, albeit in a more silent way. There were 22,886 more deaths in the first 11 months of last year when compared with the historical average—a 15 per cent increase. Year-on-year increases in deaths should be around one per cent, yet we saw 15 per cent in 2022. While this is happening, the government and the health authorities say nothing and, more importantly, do nothing. Like we heard today from the government: 'It's already being handled. Don't worry about it.' That's just not good enough.

Our media are largely silent on the issue of people dying in big numbers. Forget the football results, forget the latest woke outrage; this needs to be front-page news. This needs to be on the nightly news bulletins. The media fronted up and ran hour-long press conferences with health ministers to report one or two COVID cases in 2020-21, but where are the media now? We know that 8,824 of the 22,886 excess deaths recorded by the TGA have been linked to COVID 19—that is, around a third—which means we have 14,062 excess deaths with COVID excluded as the cause. It's a big number. We need to know why. Dementia deaths are trending 15 per cent above average; diabetes deaths, 19 per cent above average. Interestingly, influenza and pneumonia deaths are down 15 per cent for the year, which makes the numbers more alarming.

I'm not sure if many senators here in this place want to turn their minds back to 2020 and 2021. I assume most of us have buried those years in a deep, dark corner of our minds, hoping those years will just disappear. Well, they won't. Those years have set in motion a chain of events that could quite reasonably have contributed in many ways to our excess mortality. If only we were able to set up a committee, if only we were able to inquire into the reasons why—if only my colleagues in this place had listened; if only they'd cared, and supported my proposal just a few short hours ago.

So many interventions were forced on our people in those dark times just past. There were so many actions that contradicted previous learnings and best practice; so many actions that were not supported by any evidence whatsoever; so much bluff, fear and intimidation. Our borders were closed internationally, between states and sometimes between our local neighbourhoods. Lockdowns were brutally enforced. Elective surgery was cancelled. Cancer screenings were delayed and missed. Gyms were closed. Outdoor activities were outlawed. The elderly were brutally cut off from society. Jobs and businesses were destroyed, and some of them still haven't recovered. Families were separated. People were dying alone. Funerals occurred without loved ones attending. Marriages were an afterthought. And novel drugs were introduced and mandated without any long-term safety data.

The list goes on, and we all know that every one of these things could have adversely impacted our health and potentially led to death. We'll probably never know, because the vast majority of those in this place thought it not worthy of investigation.

The Australian people were initially told that mRNA injections would stop them getting infected with COVID, would stop them spreading it and, most importantly, stop them dying from it. We were told that we were selfish if we were not willing to be vaccinated and that we could kill Grandma or Grandpa. Around 97.5 per cent of Australians over 16 followed the government advice and have had at least one dose—one mRNA injection. Yet the only data that accurately identifies the vaccination status of those who got COVID, which was published in New South Wales for six months, until December last year, showed quite clearly that the vaccinated are more likely to be infected, to be hospitalised and to die of COVID.

It is time for the government to be honest with the public. We need to see the vaccination status, age and comorbidities of every person dying in Australia. More than 11 million cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in Australia, and almost 20,000 deaths. It is clear, very clear, that the mRNA injections do not adequately prevent infection, transmission or death. At best, they are ineffective. 'Safe and effective'—I'm sure we all recall being told that over and over again. In fact, I'm still hearing that same old line here in this place. We've even got government ministers still pushing the herd immunity line—still, after all that we know today. The science has let us down. Our authorities have failed us. It is time that we in this place remedy the harms that have been inflicted on our people, the harm to science and the harm to medicine.

There is only one way to rebuild trust, and I keep talking about it. It begins with transparency. Mortality rates don't just increase for no reason. There's always a reason. I want to find out why. I want us to investigate. The majority of senators decided that that was not going to happen. Instead, they wanted to keep us in the dark. Why don't we just put this matter to rest? What are we afraid of? It's time for government to admit that it's time to stop recommending these injections and it's time to stop them being mandated: they do nothing.

This is why earlier today I proposed a committee to address the issue of mortality, and everything else. We have a duty in this place to give people answers—at least, I thought we did. Many of us have shown today that we are simply in this game for power—maybe it's power, maybe it's to protect each other, maybe it is to protect both sides of the chamber. We have a duty to seek the truth, and we just failed that today. We denied the Australian people the opportunity to have answers and for our medical professionals to save lives.

The Australian people elect us to represent them. That's what they do. They elect us to represent them in the big issues that we face as a nation. They deserve more than what they got today. May God help the Australian people because, clearly, some in this place are not. It is hard to deny what happened over the last two years. We've all got eyeballs; we all can see what happened. We were misled—at best, we were misled—by big pharma and by global organisations like the WHO and the UN. I call on everyone in this place to do better.

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

I congratulate Senator Babet on moving a motion to have a Senate inquiry into excess deaths. I think that is well overdue. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars. We shut people down for a number of years—we locked them down, we locked them out, we locked them up. We shut down our borders. People were unable to see loved ones. I've got friends who didn't get to see their dying sister. There were extremely traumatic circumstances where people were denied their fundamental human rights, all in the name of keeping us safe.

Yet, here we in March 2023, three years since the actual pandemic. It's almost three years to the weekend, actually, since we engaged in this experiment, for want of a better word. It looks like tomorrow we will see close to 190,000 deaths recorded in 2022. That is almost more than 30,000 deaths higher than what was recorded in 2019, despite the fact that we've only had a couple of per cent increase in the population. At one point, we actually had a decrease in the population, when everyone decided to pack up and get out if they could. That was people who had other passports and things like that.

We deserve an inquiry. The premiers promised that they would keep us safe. We heard it ad nauseum, back-to-back, every day for about two or 2½ years straight. Yet, this is where we're at. I think that examining 2022 excess deaths is very important, but I also think it's very important to examine excess deaths in 2021. The reason why examining excess deaths in 2021 is so important is that there was next to no COVID in the community throughout that year. Therefore, we have a very clearly delineated set of numbers that can't be tainted by allegations of long COVID or anything like that.

I want to run through what happened in 2021. In 2021 we had 171,298 deaths, according to the ABS. In 2020, we had 162,592 deaths and in 2019 we had 164,800 deaths. So, because of the lockdowns in 2020, we had approximately 2,300 less deaths than we did in the prior year. Then, if we go to 2021, we've had a jump of 9,000 deaths. To those people who want to claim that the jump in excess deaths in 2021 was a catchup from the lockdowns in 2020, I would argue that that is a fair point to make. However, 9,000 is much greater than the 2,300 decline in deaths.

The other thing we need to note is that in 2021 New South Wales, the biggest state in Australia, with a third of Australia's population, was actually locked down for almost three months, in tandem with Victoria, which was locked down for about two months. So Victoria was locked down for the same period of time as it was in 2020, plus we had three months of lockdown in New South Wales. There is a fair argument to say that the number of deaths in 2021 should actually have been as low as, if not lower than, 2020 because of the extended lockdowns in 2021. But they weren't lower; they were almost 9,000 lives higher.

If we break it down even further and look at a month-by-month comparison, we can see that the jump in deaths from the prior year—the jump in deaths in 2021—only started to accelerate from May onwards. In the first four months of 2021 there is no difference; as a matter of fact, there are actually fewer deaths for the first there months. There was a slight spike in April, which was the month the vaccine rolled out, and then the deaths jumped dramatically—by over 1,000 a month, increasing to 2,000 a month in June, then 4,000, then 2,000, and then it petered back to about 1,000 as the early rollout declined. Then it jumped again towards the end of the year.

That's significant for a number of reasons. That 9,000 increase in deaths occurred only in the last eight months, after the rollout of the vaccine. It wasn't seasonal. If you look at 2017, another bad year for the flu, you see it was a seasonal jump in deaths from July-August to September. Those are the months, not June, because it generally takes about three to four weeks to record those deaths. So we have had a significant increase of three standard deviations from the mean, which is a sigma 6 event, which is a one-in-1,000 event, in 2021.

The other statistic that is really worth noting in 2021 is that the largest jump in deaths actually occurred in the states that had no COVID whatsoever. The largest jump was in WA, of all places, and was about nine per cent. It was followed by Queensland, which had a jump of 10 per cent, and then the other states, like Tasmania and South Australia. Victoria and New South Wales, which had some COVID, actually had a lower increase in mortality. That would be explained by the lockdowns, which tends to reduce the number of deaths, especially in younger people, who have fewer car accidents and things like that.

It's really worth asking yourself what happened in 2021 that didn't happen in 2020. We can refine that even more: what happened after April 2021, because that's when the spike in deaths happened, and what happened in those states that didn't have COVID? Of course there is only one obvious conclusion that: the rollout of the vaccine.

If we then jump to 2022, we can see in the early months of 2022 that the jump in deaths spiked again from late 2021, and that highly correlated with the rollout of the booster shot as well as the rollout to young children and teenagers. It is worth noting that just this week ATAGI admitted that the risk of myocarditis is greater in people younger than 30 if they received the vaccine than it is from the virus. Can someone please explain to me why ATAGI didn't identify this risk before they rolled out the vaccine to young children and why they ignored the advice of the Doherty Institute, which the federal government commissioned in August 2021, that they didn't need to give the vaccine to teenagers or children, because it wouldn't make any difference to transmission? This was throughout the period where they were trying to say it would stop transmission. As we all know now, it never actually stopped transmission or infection in the first place, but let's put that to one side.

Again, why weren't these risks identified, and why aren't we looking at the increase in excess deaths? I haven't counted the number of standard deviations from the mean in 2022, but it's actually more than three standard deviations. We are looking at a very low probability. It's worth noting that just today it was reported in the Australian by an extremely good journalist, Adam Creighton, that the number of excess deaths in Sweden, which didn't lock down at all, was one of the lowest in the world over a three-year period. Australia was fifth lowest, and Sweden was lower than that. So you have to ask yourself: did all these lockdowns really make a difference at the end of the day? We certainly don't see that reflected in the numbers from 2021 onwards. Yet again there are more questions to be asked.

Let's now break it down by what the deaths are and see whether it was the vaccine, because we have numbers that highly correlate to the vaccine. We need to look at the causes. One thing the ABS need to do—and I've asked them, as well as the TGA, twice now in estimates—is give the temporal association between the date of vaccination and the date of death for both reported and suspected deaths to the TGA of 980 deaths, plus the 171,000 deaths to the ABS in 2020-21 and the almost 190,000 deaths for this year. We need to look to see how many people died within a number of days from the vaccine and we need to look at the average daily rate of deaths. If we have 170,000 people dying every year, for example, and there are 52 weeks in the year, you would expect about 3,500 deaths a week, which equates to about 400 or 500 deaths a day. If suddenly we start seeing 600 or 700 deaths a day within a short time frame, you can start to draw temporal association correlation.

The other thing is we need to look at the types of deaths that have been occurring. The biggest jumps in deaths have occurred in dementia and diabetes. That's very important. If we know the types of deaths and where the increases have been, we can start to look at the biochemistry pathway and ask ourselves: is it possible to conclude from the numerical data and the types of deaths that we're seeing that they were related to the vaccine?

Dementia is basically a vascular disease. It could be caused by a number of things, but one of the causes of it could be the addition of the spike protein to the circulation system. We know from the top of page 8 of our favourite document, the Pfizer non-clinical evaluation report—FOI 2389 document 6 on the TGA FOI site—that the spike protein can be secreted from the cell membrane. If the spike protein that is created by the mRNA that the vaccine delivers via the lipids into the body cells—and all body cells by the way—can secrete the spike protein back into the circulatory system, that could lead to dementia. As we know from page 45 of the Pfizer non-clinical report, the lipids can be found in the brain, the eyes and the heart. And what is the cause of myocarditis? We asked Professor Skerritt that question in estimates, and of course he said they're doing more research into it. Hey, we're doing more research into it now.

Who can remember Anthony Fauci's comments last year when he was asked about the increase in menstrual bleeding? He said we have to do more research on that. Tucker Carlson went off his head, saying that it's just incredible when we are dealing with the reproductive organs of the human species that they decided not to research that before they rolled out the vaccine.

Could dementia be caused by the spike protein in the circulatory system? Quite possibly. We don't know that for sure, but evidence seems to indicate that the spike protein has stayed in the blood much longer than what the trials—animal trials, mind you, not human trials—showed in the Pfizer non-clinical report. So that's very important.

The other thing is diabetes. Diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Yet again we ask ourselves: could the vaccine cause an autoimmune disease? When we read page 8 of our favourite document, the Pfizer non-clinical evaluation report, we see that the vaccine has induced an autoimmune response. It has actually induced CD8 cells, which are known as killer T cells. Those T cells are going to kill cells. That's what they do. You have your helper cells, your B cells, and they create antibodies and destroy the foreign body in your body. That's the big difference with this vaccine. We have to remember that a normal vaccine will develop antibodies that attack the foreign object in your shoulder, in your deltoid muscle. This vaccine goes in and takes over your cell's reproductive process in terms of making proteins, and then that protein can sit on the cell membrane, as stated in the document, and that can induce an autoimmune response from these killer T cells.

What's scary about this is that—shown on page 45 of the document—these lipids can enter your spleen, your bone marrow and your lymph nodes, and these are responsible for regulating your immune system. Our bone marrow creates white blood cells, and our spleen creates red blood cells. If we start messing around with the organs that are meant to protect us and our immune cells, then we can start getting autoimmune problems. It's very important to note that the virus itself can't get into those immune organs because the spleen and the bone marrow don't have the ACE receptors that the virus does. We need to ask ourselves: is it possible that there is a correlation between the fact that this vaccine creates an autoimmune response—and induces killer T cells—and the increase in diabetes? This is why Senator Babet quite rightly wants a Senate inquiry into excess deaths, and I'd like to conclude by supporting him in that move.

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

As a servant to the many amazing people who make up our one Queensland community, I rise to speak to Senator Babet's motion, which One Nation supports. I thank Senator Babet for his motion. Why are senators scared of the truth? Why are they paranoid about having an investigation or an inquiry? If everything is hunky-dory, then, wonderful, let's get it out there. Why are you afraid?

In September 2019 three junior lab assistants from the Wuhan Institute of Virology presented to a Wuhan hospital with flu-like systems. COVID had escaped. In the four months after that reported event 100 flights were leaving Wuhan's Tianhe airport every day and going around the world. On some days five direct flights would come to Australia. That volume of movement was enhanced by the Chinese New Year, a time when, like our Christmas, people travel to see loved ones. COVID was upon the whole world and spreading at the speed of jet aircraft. There's no doubt the virus spread from Wuhan, and there is no doubt it was the result of gain-of-function research, as Nobel Prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier correctly stated in April 2020—right at the start.

In 2014 President Obama banned gain-of-function research, yet Anthony Fauci, the genocidal maniac, confessed to congress that his American National Institutes of Health moved the research offshore. They got around the law in their own country. Where did they take it? Wuhan. The ban was then lifted in 2017 to legitimise their continuing research. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council's 2022 report says that it funded 17 gain-of-function studies. Some were conducted at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in conjunction with the scientists based in the Wuhan facility. It's clear that calling COVID the Wuhan flu lets the rest of the world off way too easily. COVID was a team effort, and the blame must rest with many governments, including our own.

The idea that university academics should be allowed to engineer dangerous viruses in a lab just to understand them better is an idea born of hubris in those who have not been questioned in so long that they believe they should never be questioned. I'm thinking of Professor Skerritt, the Chief Medical Officer and the federal health department secretary when I mention those words.

After spending time in the break travelling this beautiful country, I appreciate that many Australians are fed up with COVID. One Nation continues to pursue the government over COVID for a very important reason: past actions predict future actions. At the heart of the issue is the question: what happens next time? Only a Senate inquiry or a royal commission can ask: what happened, why did it happen and how do we stop that happening again? Had all the countries participating in this gain-of-function research confessed and agreed to effective oversight, the world would have endured only a bad flu and we would now be out of it. After all, the previous record holder for the world's worst flu, the spanish flu, lasted only two years. COVID is far less severe, yet is now supposedly at 3½ years and counting.

The Chief Medical Officer himself advised me in writing that COVID severity is low to moderate and less severe than many past flus—I have it in writing. Sadly, for the world and all those that government COVID mismanagement killed, a confession did not happen. A cover-up is what happened. There's no doubt in my mind that COVID has become the Watergate of the 21st century. The cover-up has become worse than the crime. The cover-up involved falsely repurposing an escaped flu virus into a 'pandemic of the ages' in order to open up a whole new round of drug patents using mRNA technology—money.

We all remember videos coming out of China of people dropping dead in the streets right in front of a perfectly framed camera shot, because people film strangers just standing there on the off chance that they will drop dead! We know those videos were fake, if it were not so obvious at the time, because the behind-the-scenes photos and videos are coming to light. This new material features 'dead bodies' unzipping their body bags to have a smoke. There was a dead body on the street posing for selfies with a camera team. The videos were designed to spread fear and, with fear, control. That's what our health authorities were banking on when they did not call out these Chinese videos at the time, and I do mean 'banking on'. Nobody just drops dead from COVID. It takes a COVID vaccine to do that.

Let me be honest: I briefly fell for it back in early 2020. We all fell for it. We all decided the precautionary principle was the right option because we were seeing hundreds of these videos coming at us. But why are governments still keeping us on this unscientific and inhuman path? After two months, in around May and June 2020, it was obvious to me and many others that the level of harm from COVID was nothing like the risk that these fake videos had us thinking it was. COVID was demonstrated to be a flu threatening only our most vulnerable. It's not too late to come clean on the extent of the cover-up, yet every day that passes, every Australian suffering a new vaccine side effect and every unexplained death makes that harder.

Senate estimates Health sessions were a low point in accountability. I do understand the chair felt the need in Senate estimates to suspend proceedings the moment senators got into it with Health bureaucrats to ensure that nobody confessed to anything in the heat of the moment that they would later regret. And, still, they did. In response to my question on a freedom of information request for the TGA—the Therapeutic Goods Administration—summary of the 400,000 pages of patient data relating to the Pfizer stage 2/3 clinical trials, Professor Skerritt confessed that nobody in Australia reviewed the patient-level data on the Pfizer trials. Instead, we used the American Food and Drug Administration's summary of the data, made without ever having seen the original source data. This is intolerable. This was a life-and-death decision taken on behalf of 26 million Australians, and we took the FDA's word for it. Actually, the FDA itself did not even look. It took Pfizer's word for it, and that means that so did our health authorities. They trusted Pfizer when it was glowing with tens of billions of dollars, in the largest wealth transfer from Australian taxpayers ever.

Here's why the TGA made a criminal error in its judgement. When the world's leading virologists spent 18 months examining all 400,000 patient records, these eminent doctors concluded that Pfizer's stage 2/3 clinical trials showed that the vaccine caused 18 per cent more harm than no vaccine and should never have been authorised. The lid is starting to be prised open on a can full of corruption, cronyism, arrogance, hubris and lies amongst those we trusted to act in our best interests and who failed to do so.

Senator Babet is entirely correct when he points at the very high rate of unexplained deaths and asks, 'What the hell is going on?' Our health authorities have pursued a course of action that involves ignoring years of science on natural immunity and early intervention to make COVID worse than it needed to be and to create room in the market for a whole new class of drug: mRNA, which is unproven and untested. Now people are dying, and the authorities are saying, 'It's got nothing to do with us.' Yes, it is. It is everything to do with you.

Let me break this down. Firstly, natural immunity is equal to vaccine immunity. The Lancet journal on 16 February 2023 reported mean immunity against severe illness after being infected with COVID once was 90 per cent at 40 weeks. Ninety per cent! The European Union COVID digital certificate accepts that 'recovered from COVID' is equal to 'vaccinated'. So why are we still promoting vaccines to a population in which natural immunity is now most likely the dominant immunity?

Secondly, a healthy vitamin D level reduces COVID infections 48 per cent, almost half. University of Southern Queensland statistician Dr Hoque and colleagues have studied the link between vitamin D levels and COVID-19 infection rates from 10 countries and found COVID-19 infection was 48 per cent less in people with normal levels of vitamin D—almost half. The study found:

Vitamin D is known to strengthen the immune system and could possibly play a direct role in the prevention of COVID-19.

And yet we locked people up in their homes and in aged care, away from sunshine, and used police and the military to keep them there.

Thirdly, Betadine worked. While health authorities promoted hand sanitisers on a meagre six per cent benefit, in a paper from March 2023, Betadine containing Povidone-iodine was found to offer a 51 per cent improvement in symptoms. Our health authorities criticised Betadine and every other early intervention. Why?

Fourthly, Interferon is an effective early treatment for COVID. On 9 February 2023, in the New England Journal of Medicine, a peer-reviewed paper found that Interferon IFL-1 reduced the incidence of hospitalisation from COVID by 50 per cent, independent of a person's vaccine status. Interferon has been available off the shelf throughout COVID. This data was known in 2020 and we should have acted on this information back then.

Fifthly, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work. How many more times could proponents of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine show the scientific proof? These two prevent and reduce the initial severity of COVID and stop transmission and are a prophylactic to preventing people getting COVID. 'It's horse paste,' the health authorities said, while knowing all along these early interventions worked and were completely safe and extremely effective at treating COVID, preventing COVID, stopping transmission and stopping people even getting it.

Health authorities knowingly and deliberately turned COVID into a pandemic of the ages. Here's why. A brave new world of medicine by gene editing awaits the pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies, the media and health bureaucrats signed onto the vision without reading the fine print. That's killed millions of people around the world. It simply didn't matter that there were multiple treatments for COVID sitting on shelves in chemists ready to go. Doctors' and nurses' social media musical theatre performances might have looked like rejected scenes from the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Nonetheless, they deceived everyday Australians and convinced them to get the injections, and those that refused were forced, coerced or mandated into it. And now people are dying.

Unexplained deaths in Australia are up 22 per cent. That's nearly a quarter. Maybe about half of those could be COVID deaths, which necessarily proves the vaccines themselves are crap. The other half is unexplained. How many health bureaucrats are we paying to sit on their arses and examine this? What are they doing? Nothing. Half are unexplained. It may be delayed treatment, lack of exercise, lack of social connection or something else. It's without a doubt vaccines destroying the ability of the body to fight off COVID and the flu, leaving anyone infected vulnerable to serious infection and fatal infection.

Why would the TGA and their agencies behave so contrary to the interests of everyday Australians? Why? We need to know. A Senate select committee can answer that question and restore confidence in a new generation of health officials. I call on the Albanese government to convene a Senate select committee into the Commonwealth's response to COVID-19 immediately. I make this point: today, 23 March 2023, is exactly three years since we had the first single-day session of the Senate on Monday 23 March 2020. We all jumped into that and said to the government, 'Open cheque, safety first,' and we supported them. But I said to the government at the time on that day, 'We want a plan, we want to see your data and we will hold you accountable.' I pointed to Taiwan's success and to the success of Ivermectin in Monash University's in vitro trials. On Wednesday 8 April 2020 we had our second single-day session, and I repeated the same points. I then wrote to the Prime Minister and to Premier Palaszczuk in May, June and July 2020. And they misled us. They gave us rubbish! The Chief Medical Officer himself gave me a graph showing that COVID had low to moderate severity—low to moderate! He couldn't answer basic questions on it.

I will hold you accountable, as I promised on 23 March 2023, and I will continue until you are accountable. So get the monkey off your back and get these bureaucrats into an inquiry immediately.

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Roberts. Before I give the call to Senator Canavan, I will remind senators to be particularly diligent in their use of parliamentary language during this debate.

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

I'll start by congratulating Senator Babet for bringing what should be the most important topic in our nation into the Senate for discussion. I thank him for the courage and bravery he has shown on these issues. I also want to pay tribute to the work of Senator Roberts and Senator Rennick, who have gone before me and who know more about this than I do. I especially want to recognise the tireless efforts of Senator Rennick. Sometimes when I'm out and about with Senator Rennick, I see he just gets messages all the time from people right around the country. These are individual cases of people who have been hurt by the vaccines. He'll break from having a coffee or dinner in order to speak with them and to take up their cause and their issue. He's a hero to so many people because he is one of the few of us here who is doing the work that a good politician should do: hearing people's complaints and trying to help them.

These are people who, through no fault of their own, have had their lives destroyed through vaccine injuries. This has become such an emotional debate but, ultimately, a vaccine is a drug and pretty much all drugs have side effects. This drug has been developed in record time and has side effects. But because so much social control and promotion went into it, we can't even seem to have the humanity and dignity to recognise the tough circumstances that many innocent people have been put into by the rollout of the vaccine. It's an absolute disgrace that very few of us here are even willing to recognise their issues or that their lives have been turned upside down, let alone take up their cause in a fight like Senator Rennick has. So I pay tribute to him.

I don't have the answers today to Senator Babet's motion. I'm mainly going to ask questions, but I think they're very important in questions—as I said, probably the most important questions in front of this room for people right now. As has been outlined by other speakers, we have an epidemic of excess deaths in this nation. We did go through the coronavirus epidemic and, according to the official statistics, 20,000 Australians lost their lives to coronavirus. We were fortunate not to be impacted as badly as some other countries, but I think there are questions over those statistics because, often, we have seen people being categorised as dying of COVID when they really died with COVID and not necessarily of it. But let's take the official statistics of 20,000 Australian deaths from COVID over the past three years.

If we look at non-COVID excess deaths over the past two calendar years, then over the last year, as has been outlined by my colleagues here today, we're looking at around 13,000 non-COVID excess deaths. And in 2021, the year before last, there were around 8,000 non-COVID excess deaths. That adds up, roughly, to a figure of 21,000 excess deaths not related to COVID over the past couple of years. More unexplained deaths occurred over the past few years than occurred from coronavirus itself, and that statistic and that alone should put this into stark relief for us all. How much time, how much discussion, how much money and how many restrictions were put in place by governments to deal with the threat of coronavirus, which has tragically killed 20,000 Australians over the past few years? Look at the effort we put into that. And compare that to the complete silence that is existing in a vacuum down here over the 20,000 Australians who have lost their lives in unexplained ways over the past few years. Why is there this double standard?

So the questions I ask today are on behalf of those 20,000 Australians and their families who have lost their lives, and no-one can seem to give them any answers. Worse than that, no-one is seemingly even putting a lot of effort into trying to find the answer. What is the government doing on this? Twenty thousand more Australians than normally is the case have lost their lives, and we can't explain it. It is as big a loss of life as we have seen through coronavirus, and what is the response from the government?

The first question I have for the government is: Where is your royal commission into coronavirus? Where is it? The Prime Minister promised a royal commission or a royal commission-like inquiry into COVID at the last election. It is now almost a year since that election, 20,000 Australians have died inexplicably, and we still do not even have the outlines of a terms of reference for this royal commission or royal commission-like inquiry. Where is it? It is an absolute national shame that we can have royal commissions into robodebt and we can have royal commissions into all these different types of political topics, which just benefit lawyers, but we seemingly can't have a proper inquiry into the heartache that has been caused to so many Australians, not just through these particular deaths being discussed here but the lockdowns, the restrictions, the border closures, the failure to be able to go to your relatives' funerals—all of those things deserve a proper inquiry.

I give the West Australian government their due—I've disagreed with them a lot over the last few years—because they have announced an independent inquiry. Premier McGowan has announced one over there. I believe it's the only one that has actually started, three years on from the start of all this madness. But the Prime Minister of Australia made this commitment last election. In fact, when he was grandstanding a few months ago about former Prime Minister's Morrison's multiple portfolios, he repeated the claim that he would hold this inquiry. It was put to him, 'If you're concerned about all these different portfolios the Prime Minister had,' and notionally, at least initially, they were there to respond to coronavirus, 'why won't you have an inquiry into it all?' Under pressure from the press, he said, 'Yes, yes, we will have one, just not now.' His specific words were 'just not now'; we were still dealing with an outbreak in August last year. Well, we're not dealing with an outbreak anymore, guys. We are far past coronavirus. Hardly any of us are wearing masks. There are no border restrictions anymore. People are getting on with their lives. We can have this inquiry now. If not now, it will never happen. The 20,000 Australians who have lost their lives for inexplicable reasons deserve that inquiry today. They deserved it last year. They definitely deserve it today. Where is that royal commission?

The next question I've got is: where is the government's response to this motion—or anyone's response for that matter? As I say, there seems to be complete silence about the issue. Any time other senators in this place do raise these excess deaths—like Senator Rennick, Senator Roberts, Senator Babet, Senator Antic and myself have in Senate estimates—we're ridiculed for daring to question the health authorities' wisdom, daring to question the expertocracy's advice. Well, where's the ridicule today? Where is it? So far we've heard from Senator Babet, Senator Rennick, Senator Roberts and me, and next on the speakers list is 'government (frontbench)'. Who's that? No-one's put their hand up. Who is this hapless member of the frontbench?

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm speaking next.

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

Senator Pratt has drawn the short straw. She won't put her name on the list, but she will have to dutifully read out some talking points that have been prepared for her by some hapless staffers over there on the blue carpet in the ministerial wing. They've had to put together a defence. It's hardly a rousing defence of the health bureaucracy's record over the last few years, because no-one seems to be able to question it and put it back to them and ask, 'Why aren't we having an inquiry into this? Twenty thousand more people than we expected have died. Where is the inquiry into this issue? I hope Senator Pratt can enlighten us, because it seems like the white flag has been put up here on this. They are no longer defending the potential shortcomings and significant side effects of the vaccine rollout. But it's not enough to be silent now. It's time for questions and, ultimately, answers about what went wrong.

We also deserve to know, and the question should be asked: how have our health bureaucrats got things so wrong? We spent so much time in COVID—and I was guilty of this, early on—agreeing with and believing the advice of the health experts. We said that we would have to just listen to the advice. They were the experts who knew what they were doing, so we should do what they tell us. And we dutifully did that. It turns out that so much of their advice was completely, utterly and tragically wrong.

A report was released just in the last day about the excess deaths over the past few years in different countries. Despite all our border closures and largely being untouched by most of the worst COVID outbreaks, we have actually ended up with more excess deaths than Sweden—by some margin. I remember at the time all the health bureaucrats and experts were saying how terrible Sweden was. They were killing grandma and grandad! It was terrible!

In fact, we know that the official advice before coronavirus arrived about how to deal with an airborne pandemic did not call for lockdowns. All our official documents, including here in this country, by the health experts said that we shouldn't have lockdowns: you can't use lockdowns to control an airborne virus. It's not going to work. Despite all that, Sweden was about the only country in the Western world that actually complied with the initial advice on this. Everyone else became panicked and we locked people in their houses.

I still think about how we locked single mums up with two or three kids in an apartment in Western Sydney and told them they could only go outside for one hour. That's what did! We told them, 'You can only go outside for an hour.'

An honourable senator interjecting—

Yes, fresh air was the best thing you could do for them. They were struggling with screaming kids in a house, and we locked them inside for 23 hours a day and said we were protecting everyone. They also deserve this inquiry—although they did not suffer as much as those who've unfortunately died in the last couple of years—about what the hell went on and how did we get things so wrong.

What really frustrates me is the double standard that we see from our health experts. They seem to be engaging with something much more akin to behavioural science, or discredited behavioural economics, than they do with actual, real virology or pharmaceutical science. At estimates just a couple of months ago, Senator Rennick raised the case of two children, a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, who had died after receiving the vaccine. The head of the TGA at that time, Professor Skerritt, went to great lengths to say: 'Look, you can't draw conclusions from isolated cases. There are only a couple there. There could be other factors.' That is a perfectly reasonable point, may I add, from Professor Skerritt. That is true: a couple of cases is not enough to draw strong scientific conclusions—I still think there should be an investigation—but you can't draw the necessary conclusions.

But it seemed just a little unusual that Professor Skerritt would make such a conclusion on something like that, when I remember that every time a single child tragically died from coronavirus the health bureaucracy played it up like it was the worst thing ever. There's an article here in The Australian saying that Professor Skerritt at the time was grumpy and unloaded on people about downplaying COVID's effect on children, when one child—very tragically—died of the coronavirus. Yes, that is very concerning and should be investigated. But here we have a situation where Professor Skerritt used one case to scare people to get their children vaccinated but refused to use two cases to investigate the side-effects of the vaccine itself.

Perhaps one of the worst things we have done throughout this period is to force, or pressure people, to vaccinate their children when there was almost zero evidence of the scientific benefits of that. I can accept weighing up the risks of vaccinating older and vulnerable Australians, but children should have been left alone. The risks of COVID were always clearly low. They were lower than the flu. I'm not saying that COVID itself was less worse than the flu, but for children it was. The evidence was always clear, and we don't force or pressure people to vaccinate their children for the flu, but we did so here with an experimental vaccine that we knew didn't stop transmission. It wasn't going to save Grandma—it didn't save Grandma—yet we exposed our children to that risk anyway.

Again, we deserve that inquiry, because I would hope that we can get back to giving people broad-ranging advice on their health, while respecting their intelligence. One thing that has frustrated me the most over the last few years is the way our health bureaucracy all treated us like idiots. We were force-fed these scare tactics and propaganda, rather than just being given the advice and being treated like adults who can weigh up the risks and benefits of different medical treatments, because—I come back to where I started—every drug has a potential risk.

And I worry that the pharmaceutical industry here seems to constantly push the drug option on us, rather than the best health option for us. We could have told people to invest in their health, over the last few years—to exercise a bit more, eat a bit less, take some vitamin D. All of these things would have helped reduce the risk of coronavirus, as well as lot of other diseases. But, of course, what that health advice wouldn't have done was help the profits of pharmaceutical companies. It would not have done that. Most of all, if this inquiry ever does get up, if the government finally announces this inquiry—and I hope Senator Pratt can announce it right now—those pharmaceutical companies must be hauled in front of it to explain why they didn't provide more data and more evidence about the risks to people, and didn't put their profits above the 20,000 people in this country who have inexplicably lost their lives.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are those opposite who support this motion, but we haven't seen credible debate coming from others in the opposition who have been through the data and the science. Instead we see the usual conspiracy theorists trying to attach a headline critique to what is actually very robustly unpacked by the ABS if you drill down into their explanations, and the explanations of others, into why we have some variations in our mortality data. So I would encourage those opposite, if they want to get in deep, to say, 'Let's make sure we are referring to the evidence and the data, and look at what's real.' I would have expected a little more from you in your speeches in terms of actually looking at said ABS data.

What we know is that the Department of Health and Aged Care has an ongoing and continuous job to closely monitor patterns of death using the ABS data. It is validated mortality data. They also look through other provisional sources, including the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, the Therapeutic Goods Administration's Database of Adverse Event Notifications and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's National Mortality Database.

Before I go on and unpack some of the detail behind some of the trends in the mortality data that we have as a nation, I do want to reflect on Senator Roberts's remarks where he impugned the chair of the community affairs committee, suggesting that the chair had suspended the committee's estimates hearing in order to prevent evidence coming out. I was there that evening, and senators were disrespectful to the chair and witnesses. They were speaking over the chair, and the suspension of the hearing took place in order to restore order and for no other reason. I remind you—through you, Acting Deputy President Fawcett—that, in our estimates committees, just because you don't like the answer to a question you have asked or you disagree with it is not an excuse to create disorder in the hearing. I note that we have been called upon by the Jenkins review to ensure that we have a respectful workplace, and it was very hard work that afternoon, during that session of questioning.

Anyway, I will now drill down into the data. Indeed, ABS data does show that there was excess mortality in 2021. But if you drill down and look at the explanations for it, they are actually very reasonable. The overall age-standardised mortality rate for 2021 was in fact the second lowest since 2015. Logically, that would show that we need to adjust for age demographics—how many people of a certain age, how many people have certain conditions—in order to get a true reflection. You can't just say, 'Well, more people died this year than any other' without accounting for the age and health for all of those people.

We know that the age-standardised mortality rates are an important comparative measure, as they take into account the fact that we have an ageing population in Australia. The more recent ABS reports show a higher number of deaths than the baseline in 2021 and 2022. However, data released in February this year shows that in the later part of 2022 there was a notable drop in excess deaths. A recent study comparing Australia with the other OECD countries shows that excess deaths in Australia were among the lowest in 2020 and 2021.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Canavan, you've had your opportunity to make a contribution. Please follow the standing orders and allow Senator Pratt to make her contribution in silence.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The pandemic, as we know, changed many Australians' lifestyles. This in fact presents a challenge in interpreting excess mortality data. We know, for example, that there were fewer road deaths—a remarkable decline in road deaths—in Western Australia, for example, in 2020 and 2021. But those were more significant in states where there were significant lockdowns. When we compare deaths against expectations during a normal year—whatever that is—we expect to see natural variations in excess mortality rates. In 2017 Australia experienced an excess mortality rate of a statistically significant 2.6 per cent. Again, the ABS sees that as a natural variation. The following year we saw an excess mortality rate of minus 1.4 per cent; excess deaths were negative in 2020, at minus 1.2 per cent. So yes, we did a good job of looking after ourselves during COVID. Again, we can attribute that to closed nightclubs, fewer traffic accidents—a whole range of things that saw excess deaths decline.

It is therefore really important that we follow this data. It's where the progress in how we manage our nation's road rules came from. We have driven down road deaths by looking at the data and addressing the causes of such deaths over many years—and there's more to do.

In 2020 we saw that excess deaths were in fact negative, at minus 1.2 per cent, followed in 2021 by excess deaths at 3.5 per cent. ABS publications such as Provisional mortality statistics provide some core specific insights, such as patterns of deaths due to cancer, dementia and diabetes and whether they are in fact above or below expected ranges. But I tell those opposite that this data does not take into account changes in basic things like population size, age structure or other factors influencing mortality.

For those reasons, the ABS states that the provisional mortality statistics report is quite straightforward. They say, 'It should not be used as an official excess mortality estimate.' But it does point to specific pockets and trends of issues that, indeed, we do need to be aware of in our population. The ABS publication on excess mortality is released annually for the previous year. The most recent analysis, released in March 2022 for deaths occurring up to the end of 2021, saw patterns of excess deaths attributed to cancer, dementia and diabetes. That shows expected variations, with some weeks and years being higher or lower than baseline mortality rates for those conditions—for the excess deaths for those conditions. For example, from cancer they were higher than expected in 2021 but remained within the expected range. Deaths from dementia were, in fact, below the expected deaths in 2020 and above expected deaths in 2021. Deaths from diabetes in 2021 exceeded expected the upper threshold range for mortality for one week and was below the expected threshold for two weeks in 2021.

While we can't exactly say, given all that data and all of that overlaying information, what the exact cause of non-COVID-19-related excess deaths actually is at this stage, there are several possible reasons. One of them is, of course, the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 itself, or where COVID-19 has worsened another health condition, causing death. I was really pleased to bump into a range of health experts who'd been working on this issue very seriously. They include the very well respected Dr Fiona Stanley, who is a remarkable health epidemiologist. They are drilling down into the data around deaths, but they are very much drilling down into the data of the impacts of long-term COVID symptoms. They've said that long-term COVID impacts are, for a small proportion of the population, very real. They also say very strongly that the severity of long-term COVID impacts can be reduced by reducing the severity of the disease, including by getting vaccinated, which I hope and I know the majority of Australians will continue to do.

There are delayed deaths from existing underlying health problems due to the absence of many respiratory diseases in 2020 and 2021 which otherwise would have caused deaths in those earlier years, in turn impacting on the long-term averages and trends in this data. One of the benefits of COVID masks, the precautions that everyone has been taking et cetera is that it meant that we had much lower incidence of the flu and a whole range of respiratory illnesses that kill people. We've seen reductions in the timeliness of emergency and routine health care and diagnostic testing for elective surgeries, which also would have had an impact.

So I encourage those opposite not to stay on your conspiracy theories about COVID vaccination. I would have much more respect for the arguments you put forward if you actually drilled down into a balanced set of data and could even begin to mount an argument that looked at specific sets of data alongside the other significant trends that I have outlined today.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that general business notice of motion No. 195, moved by Senator Babet, be agreed to. A division having been called, I remind honourable senators that, when a division is called on Thursdays after 4.30 pm, the matter before the Senate must be adjourned until the next day of sitting, at a time to be fixed by the Senate. The debate is adjourned accordingly.