Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the last couple of weeks, I have had something of a baptism of fire as I have departed ever so slightly from the orthodoxy and recognised that we need to be prepared to talk about the costs and benefits of our vaccination system. Thankfully, though, my discussions with very senior and very committed medical specialists in the immunology area confirmed for me that they do not want to suppress debate; they want an open acknowledgement that there are risks and benefits associated with our vaccination system. They recognise that without that openness of dialogue we, in fact, feed paranoia and undermine public confidence in our system. They confirmed for me that we must allow full and transparent recording of the inevitable adverse events, and that we need to provide a system of compensation for those who have lost the lottery and suffered injury from vaccination.

There is a strong argument for most vaccinations that we need to protect herd immunity in respect of highly infectious diseases. So there is a very strong argument for, and very strong community benefit emerging from, a system of vaccination for highly infection diseases. But we must recognise that with that come the inevitable adverse consequences, and we must put in place a system that allows us to properly record those adverse events. I will leave to debate another day my concerns about the inadequacy of the system that we currently have, because today I want to talk about the need for a no-fault compensation.

I want to share a very tragic story from a Kalgoorlie family, the Hammonds. Tanya and Ben tell me this story. On 26 September 2013, James, their fourth son, was born eight weeks premature. Two days later, they were told that if they wished to have contact with their baby, they required an ADACEL vaccination. As Ben was a supervisor at a mine and had only a short space of time down in Perth, he had the shot immediately. Twelve days later, he was a complete quadriplegic.

Thanks to the staff at the Shenton Park rehabilitation hospital, he is now able to take steps—but he is still a very sick man. He has no bladder or bowel function, and he has limited liver and kidney function. Due to his condition, he is currently bedridden. Now, neither Tanya nor Ben can work. They have lost nearly everything and soon will lose their home. Tanya tells me there is no dispute that the injury was a rare result of a vaccination, and this has been confirmed by an immunologist at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. But they cannot establish the necessary negligence that is currently required to found a claim for compensation.

Our vaccination system is there to protect the community in general—to ensure that we have good herd immunity. We need to ensure that we have a system in place that recognises that there is a moral obligation on us, in those few and rare cases where we do have these severe adverse reactions, to ensure that those people have access to a compensation scheme without having to have recourse to a claim for negligence. We know that 19 countries around the world have accepted that society owes a duty of care and indeed of gratitude to those few individuals who have been damaged by a vaccine, and they have introduced no-fault compensation schemes. Germany, New Zealand, the United States, Britain and, indeed, most EU countries have such a compensation scheme. I see this as an issue of profound morality and fairness. In a vaccination program, the injured and the uninjured pay unequal shares of the social good of herd immunity. We can fix this and we must do it.