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

I move:

That the Senate acknowledges that:

(a) the concerning number of excess deaths observed in Australia in 2021 and 2022 has continued into 2023 as evidenced by all-cause provisional mortality data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics; and

(b) there is a need for further inquiry as to the reasons for these excess deaths.

In March last year, I asked the Senate to investigate excess mortality in Australia because it was at an all-time high, unfortunately. That month the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that excess deaths were more than 15 per cent above the historical average. As I said at that time, it was equivalent to something like a giant passenger plane crashing every single week for a whole year. Yet, incredibly, and unfortunately, the Senate refused to investigate this unexplained increase in deaths. Since then, the tragedy has continued. In 2023, 12,377 excess deaths occurred by 30 September. That's 9.9 per cent more than the baseline average. So far, the ABS estimates there have been 29,601 excess deaths from March 2021 to August 2023. Every one of these deaths is a person who would not have died if it had been a normal year with a normal number of deaths.

Just yesterday, I moved a motion to refer this issue to the Senate Community Affairs References Committee. I gave all my colleagues in this place the opportunity to help us investigate the causes of our excess death rate. Sadly, my motion was defeated and 35 of my fellow senators in this place, in my opinion, stood in the way of truth and justice for many people in that community. This is a matter of life and death, but it seems that, unfortunately, many in this place would rather remain ignorant. The Australian Labor Party, the Greens, Senator Lambie, Senator Tyrrell and Senator Thorpe stood in the way of this inquiry and voted against it. It's shameful, in my opinion. I must ask: what have you got to hide? What are you scared of? I would like to, however, acknowledge my colleagues from the coalition and One Nation and Senator David Pocock for supporting my motion yesterday. Thank you for doing the right thing.

I'd also like to acknowledge the Australian Medical Professionals Society, AMPS, who have stepped up to the plate and completed the hard work that many of my colleagues in this place have shamefully refused to do. Last year, AMPS held their own inquiry in Parliament House. That was a fair inquiry. It was aimed at addressing the crisis of excess mortality in Australia. The information they presented was sobering to say the least. But, sadly, in their inquiry, the attendance by senators or their staff was appallingly low. They were unfortunately ignored by most in this place. AMPS have gone on to put their findings into a book which is bound to attract attention around the world, titled Too Many Dead: An Inquiry into Australia's Excess Mortality. All of my colleagues have been sent an electronic version of this. I urge them to read it and to be informed. These Australians have taken it upon themselves to do the work that we should be completing here. The government should be doing this work.

Yesterday, Minister Gallagher said that the government does not support my motion and reiterated that the ABS is the definitive authority on mortality statistics and data in Australia. I agree. Yes, Minister; they are. They have identified a significant issue, but we should explore that issue. The Australian people are screaming out for answers. The ABS does not speculate as to why more Australians are dying of certain illnesses. That is our job in this place. Minister Gallagher also stated that every death that makes up a total statistic is a personal tragedy and she acknowledged the tragic impact of these deaths on the families and friends of those who have unfortunately lost their lives. Minister, these families deserve closure. We must interrogate the causes to ensure that the trend of excess mortality comes to an end.

In 2020, our country, our states, were shut down to save lives. Every single COVID related death was documented in regular reports produced by state and territory health departments. They were announced by premiers in regular press briefings. TV news stations ran counts. COVID statistics became somewhat of a national obsession. Yet for thousands of Australians who have since died unexpectedly for unknown reasons the people in charge have shown little concern or motivation to investigate, and the media have been largely mute.

It is important to note that excess deaths didn't start in 2020 but in March 2021, the same time as the rollout of the mRNA COVID vaccines. Correlation obviously does not prove causation, but it indicates that the COVID vaccines may have caused or at least contributed to some of these excess deaths. We do know that these novel vaccines have injured and killed many people, but we won't know if there's a link to excess mortality unless we investigate. What we do know is that, if the COVID vaccines were truly safe and effective as we keep hearing, there should have been no severe COVID in Australia and no excess deaths except in the tiny fraction of the population who were not vaccinated, but this isn't what we have seen. For example, the data released by the New South Wales Ministry of Health in 2022 showed that vaccinated people made up the vast majority of people who were hospitalised, treated in the ICU and died. Unsurprisingly, New South Wales stopped publishing this data that didn't fit with the official mantra that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, and that's just not good enough.

What we saw was that, once the Australian people were highly vaccinated at the start of 2022, Australia opened its borders and COVID cases and deaths exploded. Not only that: for every single month in 2022 the age standardised rate of death was higher than in any of the preceding three years. Think about that. It's incredible. This was the omicron wave, which was not as lethal as earlier variants, yet highly vaccinated Australians, who expected to be protected by the COVID vaccines, suffered extremely high excess mortality. We know that the COVID-19 vaccines cause heart inflammation, myocarditis and pericarditis. We know that heart inflammation can pass undetected and can be fatal. So it's disturbing to see that, while deaths due to coronary heart disease have fallen, deaths due to other cardiac conditions, which includes deaths due to heart inflammation, increased by 13 per cent in 2022 and 12 per cent in 2023.

Other areas of concern are dementia and diabetes. Deaths from dementia increased by 17 per cent in 2022 and by 11 per cent in 2023. Diabetes deaths were up by 20 per cent in 2022 and up by 14 per cent in 2023. There has also been a disturbing increase in cancer, of 6 per cent in 2022 and of 7 per cent in 2023. Where has this spike come from? We need to find out.

We owe it to all Australians, especially the family and friends of the almost 30,000 Australians who died prematurely since the start of 2021, to find out what is causing Australia's tragic rise in all-cause mortality and to do everything we can to put an end to this dangerous trend.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just indicate that the government does not support this motion. In fact, much of what sits behind this motion is an assertion that there is data that is unavailable to the public—that there is data that, for all sorts of motivations that are impugned by the characters who share this sort of stuff on social media, has not been made available, for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

For the people who spend a lot of time in this place late in the evening on the socials posting thing that are true and things that are untrue, often with a disregard for evidence, science and the institutions that are there to analyse and disseminate the data—of course, I'm sure that there are some people who do that who honestly believe what it is that they say. There are probably a few of those. There are some who know it not to be true but say it anyway because it's a well-worn tactic of people who seek to propagate radical right-wing extremism.

There are some who've gone through a bit of a journey themselves who started doing it for those reasons—that is, they latched onto these things as a way of organising the maximum possible position for their political position even if they were things they knew to be untrue, and they have subsequently, in a process of self-radicalisation, begun to believe that they are true. I've seen some evidence of that in this place. It's the kind of process that we've seen in many parts of the world with this kind of conspiracy-theory thinking, bereft of the benefits of the last few centuries of scientific discovery since the Enlightenment and using those for a very narrow, very nasty set of organising propositions.

Where there is an event like a global pandemic, it is of course a frightening event. The Spanish flu caused untold misery, untold deaths around the world. There were 19 million deaths in Europe—more than the Great War. In the history of my family in this country, in the space of one week in the town of Uralla, a relative of mine, his daughter and his granddaughter all died of the Spanish flu in their home. It's not imaginable for us here in Australia, where we have the benefits of a health system and we have the state and Commonwealth governments working—not perfectly, but working—to deal with the challenge. People are able to attend hospitals. But remember the beginning of the COVID pandemic. There was no certainty that a vaccine would be developed in time, and people were frightened.

Some people in the political system, of course, where they see fear see opportunity. Where they see a capacity to divide people, to isolate them and to frighten them, that is an opportunity. We've seen that in other phases of our history. It will happen again. It certainly happened around the COVID-19 crisis. Some of the things that were being shared on social media in particular were the preserve of the funny characters you would find, when I was growing up in country New South Wales, in the League of Rights. They were the far-right organisation. They made efforts at organising. They made efforts at incursions into political parties. They did their best. They were the jackboot crowd in regional New South Wales and regional Queensland in particular. They'd be handing out the little leaflets outside the show or outside the markets.

Where there were bookshops, occasionally they would be found, Senator Smith; that's right. It would be all of the conspiracy theory stuff of the age—much of it with an antisemitic overtone, I have to say. Very regrettably, they were Australians who did not understand the moral weight of what it is they were doing. We laughed at those characters because they were isolated and all they could do was hand out something that they had run off on the Gestetner in some lonely garage somewhere and post it around through Australia Post. They would be there at those events.

I have to tell you as an aside, colleagues, that the Glen Innes Show is on this weekend. It's where I grew up. It's a fantastic agricultural show. I urge Senator Scarr and Senator Rennick and others making their way back to Queensland to do it by road, go through Glen Innes and see the Glen Innes Show and Mayor Banham.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Are you in the woodchopping competition?

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not going to be in the woodchopping competition. I'm not going to be in the bull riding.

I won't be in the smash-up derby either. I will be in none of these things, partly because I—

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sorry, Minister; just resume your seat. Senator Rennick?

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

I have a point of order on relevance. I think we've got someone filibustering for time here. Can we stay on topic, please?

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Rennick, there is absolutely no point of order. If I could impose that penalty, I'd be looking a lot younger after the years I've been in here and what I've listened to. Minister, you have the call.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And we would have all gone home quite some time ago if Senator Sterle were really in charge of the timing of these things. But it's a fantastic show.

Just to make my friend Senator Rennick happy, my point, of course, is that times have changed. It's no longer the preserve of people handing out little roneoed notes distributed from some garage somewhere in the League of Rights headquarters or wherever. Anything can be said on social media. We see deepfake material being sent out. We see assertions being made which sound true but are in fact not true. Things are generated overseas in countries that don't have the best interests of Australians or Australia at heart, in antidemocratic countries, in countries with which we don't share values—adversaries, in fact. Meme factories are generating what I understand are called bots, which share the material on and share the material on—material that is completely untrue. But, if you follow the line from that material back to the antisemitic, nasty conspiracy theory stuff that was being shared by the League of Rights crowd and others, it's a pretty straight line.

And what is it that it's our responsibility in this place to do? It is to tell the truth, to support the science, to make sure that governments and this place act with transparency, to do it with confidence and to not be distracted by the efforts of some—not just on the crossbench but within the opposition parties here—who seek to take the utterly rational questions, apprehensions and fears that ordinary Australians of course have when there is an event like a global pandemic. There's a pretty close relationship between pandemic denialism, assertions about vaccines, assertions about the availability of information, and climate denialism, quite frankly. It is all in the same continuum of political activity. I know that on the other side many good people—I wouldn't vote for them in a pink fit, but there are many good people—are doing their best to stand up against this kind of conduct. I'm just saying that now is the time to be firm and resolute. Don't be worried about your preselections. Don't be worried about the hard Right. Don't be worried about the thuggery. Assert what is in the public interest and what is in the national interest.

The truth here is that the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects all of this data, mortality statistics and all the related data in Australia, and there are regular publications of that data. Provisional mortality reports are published monthly and every second month, as a way of updating the data in the most transparent way possible. Deaths in Australia are updated annually, and excess mortality reports are published twice-yearly.

Now, any person, any researcher, has access to that data. The trick, of course, with data is you've got to have the skills, you've got to have the academic background, you've got to have the research capacity to be able to interpret it intelligently, to analyse it properly and to report on it in a way that is true and ends up being truthful. And that is one of the problems here. You can take any bit of data and produce the kind of material that is being generated by some of those on the other side of this argument.

It's published online. It is available to every Australian. It's used by researchers, government departments and agencies like the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and it's reported in reputable publications, by actual academic journals that have standards—where people require doctorates not out of Corn Flakes packets but from reputable universities—and they provide analysis that should guide public policy making. Where there are problems, they should be transparent. But that's what should guide public policy making.

In their analysis, the ABS have compared the number of deaths which have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic to the number of deaths expected based on historical trends and adjusted population changes. It includes deaths from all causes, not only those related to COVID-19. While death rates and causes of death are key indicators of the health status of a population, it's important to remember, of course, that behind every death sits a personal tragedy. Behind that sits, very often, misery for a family, and they should not be the subject of political manipulation and grandstanding and nasty—

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Rennick.

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

I'm glad Senator Ayres has raised the issue of the ABS mortality figures because that is exactly what I was going to talk about today. I want to emphasise that I want to talk about all-cause mortality, not excess deaths, because excess deaths are a modelled figure; I want to talk about the actual figures.

In 2019, Australia had 164,000 deaths. In 2020, once COVID started and we had the lockdowns, Australia had 162,000 deaths. In 2021, Australia had 172,000 deaths. There was a rise in 2021 of 10,000 deaths in Australia, despite the fact that Australia did not have an increase in population that year. So the question is this: what caused the rise in deaths by10,000 people? And those deaths occurred in the last eight months of the year. So in the first four months of the year, before the COVID vaccine rollout, there was no increase in deaths from the prior year. That means that the jump in deaths was over a thousand people per month from May onwards. Those figures are recorded in the ABS figures. They are a fact. Now, the question has to be asked: why did all-cause mortality, the number of deaths, rise after the COVID vaccine was rolled out but before COVID was in the community, in December 2021?

When we look at the hospital admissions for myocarditis and heart conditions, they jumped as well. We have had the TGA admit that that was because the vaccine caused autoimmune issues. We know that from the TGA report. I don't have to read studies; I read the actual non-clinical report on the COVID vaccine and the product assessment report. This is an mRNA vaccine, a technology that I happened to invest very heavily in prior to coming into parliament. So I'm not some Luddite that is against the technology. I invested in a company called Viralytics which was designed to be used on patients who had stage 3 and stage 4 cancer. They eventually got taken over by Merck & Co. That's why I am familiar with the technology.

The thing about the mRNA vaccine is that this was the first time that a drug was ever designed to be delivered inside a human cell. This is the key distinction between an mRNA vaccine and a protein vaccine. Because it goes inside the cell via a process called transfection, which is a novel technology, it induces a T cell response. The body's immune system recognises the foreign body inside a cell and it attacks an otherwise healthy cell. This is a key difference between a protein vaccine, where the immune system recognises the foreign body and generates B cells to attack the foreign protein. The mRNA vaccine generates a T cell to destroy your cell.

What we also know is that the coronavirus has 29 proteins. Normally in a traditional protein vaccine you pull off the spike protein and you get 28 other proteins. It's quite a large macromolecule. That is too big to cross the endothelium of the bloodstream. You therefore don't get the same biodistribution as you do with an mRNA vaccine. Because of that, we know from the biodistribution studies on page 45 of the non-clinical report TGA FOI 2389-6, the lipids went throughout all organs in the animal studies. That means all organs are susceptible to autoimmune response by the actual human body. What's more concerning is the fact that the spleen and the bone marrow don't have ACE receptors. The virus cannot get into the white blood cells. The exception to that, of course, is AIDS, which attacks white blood cells. Most other viruses can't attack white blood cells. So by the vaccine—and we saw this on page 45—allowing the lipids to go into the spleen and the bone marrow you are inducing an autoimmune response in all your organs. We have seen an increase in diabetes. That is an autoimmune disease. That is more evidence, along with the increase in people being admitted to hospital with myocarditis, of autoimmune issues.

People are entitled to know. As Senator Ayres said, every life is important. People are entitled to know why 10,000 extra people died in the period before COVID was in the community yet after the vaccine rollout.

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

I move:

That the motion be now put.

Question negatived.

Debate interrupted.