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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I wish to comment on Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee report COVID-19 royal commission. Last year, I was successful in having the Senate inquire into the prospective terms of reference for a royal commission into the government response to COVID-19. The inquiry was held, and I thank Senator Paul Scarr for his even-handed treatment of the process and for producing with the secretariat at an excellent report—outstanding! After hearing and reading testimony from multiple highly qualified witnesses, every one of whom called for a royal commission, the committee did, in fact, recommend a royal commission be held. Their report was 128 pages of honesty, decency and common sense.

Last week, the government provided its response to the report—one-and-a-bit pages. Here's what it says: 'The government does not support a royal commission. The government does not support working with the state governments on an inquiry. The government does not support the proposed terms of reference. The government does not support any further public involvement in the inquiry process.' How can we have an investigation when the government says it does not support working with the state governments, yet it's got an inquiry underway right now that is not considering the state governments. Instead, the Albanese Labor government will continue with their cover-up inquiry, comprised of two bureaucrats and a university academic closely involved in the COVID response. Shame! The government is letting bureaucrats and academics investigate themselves. What a disgrace! It is betrayal. It's inhuman.

During the last election campaign, the Prime Minister promised a royal commission or similar inquiry. A Senate select committee inquiry would fit that description. Then Senator Gallagher promised us a royal commission. No wonder the public distrust politicians, when two promises that were as clear as day were broken the minute the Labor Party came to power. It does raise this question, though: what was the motivation for the government to proceed with a cover-up instead of its promised judicial inquiry? Could it be the donations the Labor Party received from the pharmaceutical industry in the last election?

Here's the list from the Australian Electoral Commission of donations made to the Australian Labor Party in 2022-23: AbbVie, the makers of leuprorelin, a puberty blocker, $14,000; Alexion Pharmaceuticals, $33,000; Amgen biopharmaceuticals, $27,500; Aspen Medical, $83,000; AstraZeneca, $33,000, and isn't there a huge conflict of interest in refusing to investigate them; Bayer, $33,000; Bristol-Myers, $52,000; HA Tech pharmaceuticals, $54,000; and Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals, $36,000. Kerching, kerching, kerching! The cash register at the Labor Party is ticking over. Here are more donations: Merck Sharpe & Dohme, $66,000; Navitas, $33,000; Pfizer, $25,000—another cash register kerchinging. There was Roche, $66,000; Sanofi-Aventis, $42,000; Pharmacy Guild of Australia, who enjoyed years of profit dispensing high-paying COVID injections, $154,000; and Medicines Australia, the peak lobbying body for the pharmaceutical industry, which just gave the former head of the TGA, Professor Skerritt, a job as a director, donated $112,000 to the Labor Party campaign funds—kerching! Including smaller donations, the Labor Party raked in almost a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies and associated favours bought.

It's not just big pharma, either. Remember when you couldn't get COVID at Bunnings, yet you could get it at your neighbourhood hardware store? Governments forced many hardware stores to stop business during lockdowns, and they went broke while Bunnings grew its market share. Then they set up vaccination stations in their car parks. I know many people thought that was odd, so let's look at this list of donations. The owners of Bunnings, Wesfarmers, donated $110,000. For completeness, let me list One Nation's pharma donations in 2022-23: none! There was not one donation from the pharmaceutical industry, the banking industry, the healthcare industry or the net zero industry. Why? It's because One Nation is not for sale.

I will now review what the government are covering up with their refusal to hold a COVID royal commission. This is based on expert witness testimony to the committee inquiry and on peer reviewed papers and data analysis which have come out since the inquiry. Firstly, testimony before America's congress proves SARS-CoV-2 was the product of gain-of-function research, with funding from Anthony Fauci's National Institutes of Health, managed through Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance. The research started in the USA, and, when President Obama banned gain-of-function research, it was moved to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But the research continued secretly and illegally in North Carolina. We know that. In 2021, Australia's CSIRO confirmed it assisted in the Wuhan research. We're complicit.

Secondly, the official timeline for COVID is wrong. The University of Siena in Italy sequenced COVID on 10 October 2019. Unconfirmed reports persist of three lab technicians from Wuhan lab presenting with flu-like symptoms to a hospital in Wuhan in mid-September 2019. Those three were COVID patients zero. Wuhan has 90 direct overseas flights a day, including five a day into Italy and five a day into Australia, where symptomatic infections started showing up around the end of December 2019. This means that, in October 2019, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored the COVID-themed Event 201 war game that the World Economic Forum organised, COVID was alive in public. Note that the Nobel Prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier sequenced COVID in April 2020 and found, 'It is not natural. It's the work of professionals and of molecular biologists—a very meticulous work.' Luc declared the virus was a combination of the original man-made SARS virus, parts of the HIV virus and a bat virus which was there to fool the body's immune system into thinking it had never seen the virus before and as a result had no immune response to it.

The fact that the virus escaped before it could be perfected has saved billions of lives. What they tried to do was evil personified. Here is an example. The RNA genome of SARS-CoV-2 consists of 30,000 nucleotides and 11 major coding genes. Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna took the 4,284 nucleotides constituting the spike protein. At positions K986P and V987P, they introduced mutations to stimulate increased production of human antibodies. Those spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2 are involved in receptor recognition, viral attachment and entry into the host cells. The last part is significant. Both COVID itself and the mutated vaccine material enter human cells. There's certainty on this point. These COVID vaccines are gene therapies yet are not regulated as such. No safety testing was done on the long-term effect of introducing a mutated COVID DNA strand into the human genome.

Secondly, Oxford University investigated brain injury from COVID. It mapped the brains of 785 participants and waited for them to get COVID; 401 obliged, creating a control of 384. All were scanned a second time, and any brain function difference was attributed to COVID spike proteins. Oxford University found 'significant longitudinal effects, including a reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue contrast, changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally connected to the olfactory function and a reduction in global brain size in the SARS-CoV-2 cases. The participants who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed on average a greater cognitive decline between the two time points.' The paper concluded these results may indicate degenerative spread of the disease through olfactory pathways through the nose. Doctors who advocated for nasal preparations were actually right. The nose turns out to be the key. One study found 471 bacterial agents in 171 face masks, many of which had high resistance to antibiotics. This was an important issue for the royal commission to understand.

Thirdly, Yonker et al. from Massachusetts General Hospital tested young people presenting with chest pains and found free spike antigen was detected in the blood of adolescents and young adults who developed post-mRNA-vaccine myocarditis, linking the shots with heart disease in the young.

Fourthly, we knew as early as November 2021 that spike protein could build up in the lungs, heart, kidney and liver, causing an inflammatory response, yet we kept injecting spike proteins into people, including children, over and over. Now they're dying suddenly and doctors are baffled—the hell they're baffled!

Fifthly, SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, meaning most likely the shots as well, have serious effects on the vasculature of multiple organ systems, including the brain. Outcomes include fatal microclot formation and, in rare cases, encephalitis. Wait a minute—isn't New South Wales now urging parents to vaccinate their children against a sudden outbreak of encephalitis? COVID and COVID shots are the same man-made poison, yet we never tested the shots long enough to reveal that. Now people are dying and suffering life-altering disease while we continue to inject the public with boosters containing the very substance that is causing these deaths and injuries.

Today I'm announcing that, in the first week of December, I will be conducting the third of my full-day reviews of COVID, to be called 'COVID on trial'. I promise to hound those responsible—

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Roberts. Do you wish to seek leave to continue your remarks?

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

Yes, I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted.

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

I have listened to these contributions from Senator Roberts and some of his colleagues—Mr Dutton's favourite candidate for the Senate, Senator Rennick—and others. I have spoken about them at length before, and I don't intend to take much time now.

That contribution really is a titanic effort to fit every single barking-mad conspiracy theory into one contribution, into a 15-minute slot of extremism and conspiracy theories. The problem with extremism and conspiracy theories is that they do damage. They are deliberately calculated to do damage. They are propagated by people—

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

I'm standing on a point of order. Senator Ayres is impugning motive and maligning without facts.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have been listening. I think the remarks are general in nature and haven't been directed towards you, Senator Roberts, but I will continue to listen.

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

He said I was literally trying to hurt people.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To the extent that you made that remark, Senator Ayres, are you willing to withdraw?

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

Of course. I'm always happy to withdraw. The people who propagate those conspiracy theories either are unwitting dupes who are silly enough to believe that kind of material that you find in the swamp of the dark recesses of the internet or are deliberately seeking to do social harm. I don't know which category Senator Roberts falls into, but he falls into one of them because there is no alternative there. Misinformation—

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ayres, I do think that crossed a line. I think you now are impugning Senator Roberts, so I'm going to ask you to withdraw that.

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

I withdraw that. I have to say that I withdraw unreservedly, but it is open to me to canvass what the various reasons are for this kind of damaging misinformation and disinformation being propagated. It has a serious effect, and we see that, where there is extremism, there is a reason why the ASIO director-general highlights the role of extremist misinformation and disinformation in terms of its corrosive effect. It does lead to some of the acts of violent extremism here and overseas, motivated by the same vile conspiracy theories that we've just heard and that are supported by some of these characters here.

The problem, really, for the Liberal and National parties on this is how much they continue to tolerate it. It's all the pats on the back for the extremists. It's always: 'Yes, don't worry. That's just Senator Roberts. You know, he and his cooker associates—that's just them. Don't worry about it.' But every time they do that, they support extremism—

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

On a point of order: Senator Ayres is again maligning. I'm not associated with cookers.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ayres, please restrain yourself.

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

I am doing my best. What is being propagated is so damaging to Australia, to our democratic institutions, to the health of our public debate and to public health itself, and it is exactly the kind of conspiracy theory ideology that is used to promote violence and threats online. The kind of swamp online that these theories come from is exactly the swamp that these kinds of characters play in, and it should not be tolerated by a party that says that it hopes to form government one day.

It should not be tolerated, but it is. It is tolerated. It is encouraged. It is acquiesced to. It is becoming a stronger and stronger strain of thinking amongst some of these characters in the Liberal and National parties, some of whom are on what appears to be their own path to radicalisation. So I just think it has got to be called out every single time it happens, and I will continue to call it out because it's bad for Australia, damaging to our democracy and beneath contempt, in my view.

Question agreed to.