Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All of us return to our states tonight, and I return to Queensland, a state that still has emergency powers that were introduced in mid December and extended to April. I make an appeal to leaders around the country that, with omicron having peaked and now declining in daily cases, we review the need for these emergency powers. Emergency powers are easy to introduce. They don't take long. The laws are drafted. You simply insert a date and get parliamentary agreement. I've argued that the state LNP was quite right in being cautious and using emergency powers as a last resort. What we've learned from COVID, of course, is that it's highly disruptive, and for some of us more than others. This has been a two-year journey—the word 'unprecedented' completely overused—but both sides of this chamber have dealt with these shocks. I remember the management of the GFC also set us challenges we'd never seen previously. And Australia is recognised as having handled these shocks remarkably well. But, as I go around the states, that element of freedom that we bestowed on jurisdictions in the guise of national cabinet, while it worked for us in the first 12 months, obviously became frayed after that. There were significant areas of overlap but also a gap.

If we look at the individual policies and compare states, one wonders, if there's only one body of science, how there can be so many varying responses. I'll put mandates into that category. Mandates need to have a scientific basis, because, fundamentally, vaccination itself lies at the heart of scientific evidence. But seeing states dreaming up and fabricating mandates for potentially political purposes is, I think, deeply concerning. If mandates differ between jurisdictions, it can only be for political reasons, because there's only one a science.

The Lancet said very clearly in an opinion piece: this is not an epidemic of the unvaccinated. And I differ from most of my medical colleagues because I don't believe in ostracising, humiliating, shaming or attacking people that don't have faith in a vaccine. I know the only way forward is to educate, politely and patiently. Australia now leads the world at the top of a handful of fully vaccinated populations. We don't need to go to these extra measures to corner, compel, threaten and sack people for those extra few people to get the jab.

When you talk to those that are running the vaccine hubs now, they'll often say to people coming in for their boosters, 'Thank you so much for coming in willingly, because all I've seen during this period of mandate are people doing it resentfully and regrettably, and often just to keep their employment.' We don't have to be that way. We can get through COVID by positively encouraging a public health message and respecting that some people just aren't going to accept it, either because of level of education, awareness or understanding, or from listening to YouTube videos and following Facebook pages. This is the modern challenge of media.

To those that were in the rallies, to those that have come down and protested against the mandates: while I don't necessarily share your point of view, each of you are citizens, worthy of an opinion. What we shouldn't be doing is humiliating, cornering and leading ourselves into a situation where good people have been sacked from their employment by virtue-signalling companies—travel agency companies that, for no good reason, sack someone who works at home on a computer taking bookings. We have a very robust AHPPC system, advised by the best in the country at ATAGI.

As the chair of the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training I was deeply concerned, as was my deputy chair, about the impact of COVID on the work of Fair Work, and we dug more deeply into the situation to look at what the implications were. Too many Australians have lost loved ones to COVID, but too many more, for no good reason, have lost their jobs in Queensland.

The emergency powers have to come to an end. Whatever the mandate set out to achieve, it got the extra blip of vaccination in December. I urge the Queensland Premier: We will get through COVID. We can do it without mandates and without sacking people. We can do it without turning baristas and waiters into policemen at the doors of restaurants. No, this is not the most important thing in beating COVID. It's working in unison and making sure that mandates, if ever used, are a last resort.