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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to say that the Biosecurity Amendment (Strengthening Biosecurity) Bill 2022 is not just a plant biosecurity bill; in addition, it is a human biosecurity bill. We endorse many of the provisions relating to plant biosecurity. While we support many of those plant biosecurity initiatives, we cannot support the provision that enables the government to consign a class of people to quarantine. After the COVID mismanagement and the deceit and abuse that we saw from state Liberal, Labor Party and National Party governments and from a Liberal Party in government federally, the last thing that One Nation wants to do is to give politicians and unelected bureaucrats more power. That's the last thing we will do.

Government is always a trade-off between the rights of the individual and the need for collective action against real security threats—and I emphasise the word 'real'. This bill, when it comes to human quarantine, will move the weight of power further into the hands of government and unelected bureaucrats and away from the people. In the eternal human challenge between control and freedom, we must always support and enable freedom. To give any government this much power presupposes that the government knows what to do with it. So let's have a look at the recent history of governance in this country when it comes to a virus and, supposedly, quarantining. I've compiled a list of 30 initiatives that occurred for the first time in our country's history. I will read a few of them; I'm not going to read all 30.

This is the first time that governments forcibly injected people with something that can kill them and is killing them. People are dying in their hundreds in this country—potentially, in their thousands, because the records are not accurate. This is the first time that governments have prevented sick people accessing a proven safe and effective treatment, in Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. They banned it. Doctors in other countries and good doctors in this country worked out that it was very successful and very safe, and 3.7 billion doses have been administered. Yet, those treatments were banned and the doctors were then banned for doing their job.

Greg Hunt, then federal Minister for Health said—and these are his words—that 'the world is engaged in the largest clinical vaccine trial'. It was experimental. It was a radical new gene therapy based treatment, yet it was being mandated. It has not been tested. It had a literature review, and that's it. We've seen a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big pharma. How the hell can we trust government in this country—state or federal? Towards the end of the second year, they said, 'We now need to live with the virus.' Oh, really? Then they extended the emergency provisions that declared states of emergency.

We cannot trust governments in this country. Look at the previous Prime Minister. He said repeatedly that Australia has no vaccine mandate. Those are Scott Morrison's own words, yet the Morrison-Joyce federal government drove the vaccine mandates that forcibly injected people. At the very least, they enabled the mandates, because it was the federal government—the Joyce-Morrison government—that bought 280 million doses of this stuff. They could have stopped the states at any minute simply by not giving the states the injections. Secondly, the federal government indemnified the states against vaccine damage. Thirdly, the federal health department provided the data and systems needed for states to enforce the mandates.

The federal government drove this. The state premiers agreed. They say that their vaccine mandates are in line with the unconstitutional so-called National Cabinet that Prime Minister Scott Morrison led. The federal government mandated vaccines in aged-care workers, the defence department and the Australian Electoral Commission—full of lies and not based on science. That's just with the existing provisions without this one that's being added. Then we saw AHPRA, a concocted regime based upon so-called national law. Now we see Queensland driving the latest iteration of national law—making it a provision that confidence in the health system is more important than patient care. That is naked suppression and control of doctors.

Then we realised that the injections were forced on people—if you want your kids to eat then you'll get this injection. That's what was done in this country. We saw that untested—or partially tested, very inadequately tested, incompletely tested—injections were used, and approvals were based in America for these injections on big pharma's word. That's it. The CDC didn't test them, the FDA didn't test them. Our TGA and ATAGI swallowed the lie about these injections. Military boots were put on the ground to enforce imprisonment of healthy people in their homes in New South Wales. The Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, ordered his militarised police to fire on innocent protesters. Who will ever forget what happened at the Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Day? He locked down the Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Day. Who will forget the digger who was stopped from entering the Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Day?

Arbitrary degrees, changing from one day to the next—how the hell can the science behind all the measures be science when they're conflicting? Science should be transparent, not locked in a cupboard. And if it's science, it should be consistent and debatable. None of this applied in COVID restrictions. Instead, we had censorship and persecution of good and decent doctors accused of being heretics. This is 2022, not 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, when dissenters were labelled witches and burned. Today it's doctors and nurses being burned, their 40-year careers being burned at the stake. Now their careers are not even smouldering embers—they're gone, they're dead.

Power must always be accompanied by transparency, and yet we cannot even get copies of big pharma's vaccine contracts with our federal government. The Greens and the Labor Party stopped that, and the vote was tied. The process of dismissing almost 1,000 doctor supported deaths due to COVID injections turned into 15, so the process that was used by the TGA to take almost 1,000 doctors reported deaths—and doctors are responsible for reporting deaths in this country—and making the number 15 is not even quantified, not even specified. It's arbitrary, and we also know from listening to doctors and nurses that the reported deaths are a tiny fraction of the actual deaths, so there are way more than 1,000. That's the story overseas as well.

And now you want more power—more power to put classes of people into quarantine. Who would they be? Non-vaccinated people? And you want power over people. You're not going to get it from One Nation. That's why we cannot support this. All the things that I've talked about were for a coronavirus that the Chief Medical Officer admitted to me in writing was of low to moderate severity—low to moderate severity. Look at the actual results. This is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, published in part as a result of a One Nation document discovery a few weeks ago in this very chamber. In 2019, the year before COVID, the seasonal flu cost 4,126 lives. The next year, 2020, Australia recorded 882 deaths from COVID and 2,287 deaths from the flu, for a total of 3,169 deaths, almost 1,000 fewer deaths than the flu alone killed the previous years. Then, in 2021, 1,137 deaths were recorded from COVID and 2,073 were recorded from the flu, for a total of 3,210. This means that deaths from the flu, including COVID, across the first two years of the virus in this country were right on the long-term average of 3,255. There was nothing unusual about the Australian death rate in 2020 or 2021, and yet the COVID substances, the injections, were given emergency approval without any testing. The only thing unusual about our death rate in 2021 was that it was at a seven-year low. This makes a joke of provisional approval granted for injections out of urgency.

We are the party of freedom. Freedom is the key to human progress. Freedom is the key to responsibility. Freedom is the key to human satisfaction. Freedom is the key to truth, which was squashed and suppressed and became a victim of the government's COVID restrictions at state and federal levels. Before you ask for additional power, we need a royal commission to establish whether you need more power and if the power you already possess has been used properly and honestly. You're asking us for more power, yet you have not established why you need more power. You have already misused the power parliaments have given you and exercised your power with zero transparency at state and federal level. We cannot support this because it contains a provision for classifying humans into quarantine, as a class. We have one flag. We are one community. We are one nation, and we will always stand for freedom.