Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in opposition to this globalist takeover of Australian health, represented by the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. These are bills which are going to further entrench the errors of the COVID-19 era into permanent federal bureaucracy in this country. The COVID period was a time of arbitrary bureaucratic edicts and contradictory health advice, something that more and more people have come to admit as the social pressure applied to them during that period has lessened. State government public health messaging, which inspired at the time by the US's own CDC and the World Health Organization, manipulated the Australian population, and the tactics used had very much the opposite of science and medicine in mind. They were about fear and propaganda. The COVID period was an absurd period in the nation's history in which bullying temporarily prevailed over rational discussion and inquiry, though, thankfully, many Australians saw through it. Arbitrary edicts such as mask-wearing and 1.5-metre social distancing were weaponised to close playgrounds, tape off park benches, separate families at funerals and prevent people from visiting dying loved ones in hospitals. Much of the suffering during that period was the result of government overreach and intervention that was enacted 'for your safety'.

Over in the US, the American CDC became a symbol of politicised science, suppressed dissent and connections to pharmaceutical giants that were apparently above government scrutiny. The CDC's general advice was relied on by left-wing politicians and socialists and generally wielded as a cudgel even though dissidents were simply asking basic questions that the health authorities had no reasonable answers to. Those questions included things like: 'Why do I have to wear a mask on the way to the restaurant but not when I'm sitting at the table? Why do I have to get a vaccine with no long-term safety data if it doesn't prevent infection or the spread of the disease? Why is the Nobel Prize-winning, for-humans drug ivermectin being suppressed when it is safe?'

Furthermore, the American CDC has often served as yet another enforcement arm of the ideological state, another bureaucratic element of clown world, as it could be called. It publishes articles about combating racism through public health policies and seems preoccupied with promoting a DEI version of public health in which the patriarchy and colonialism are portrayed as public health threats. One can read articles published by the CDC to find out the Impact of racist microaggressions and LGBTQ-related minority stressors: effects on psychological distress among LGBTQ+ young people of color, which, of course, is clearly designed to promote a cultural and political narrative and has nothing to do with health. This is not actual health research.

During COVID, the US's CDC advice simply reiterated health slogans and mantras, which made it clear that to ask questions meant you should essentially be considered a threat to others. We don't have to go over all the details there; we've lived them so often. But I think it would be fair to say that, following the COVID period, we should be reconsidering our relationship with and our reliance on such institutions. The notion that the lesson we've learnt from the pandemic period is that we need greater centralised authority with regard to public health measures is a laughable concept, yet that's apparently what we learnt. That notion here arrives in light of the COVID-19 response inquiry report, which was published late last year.

That review was always going to present a one-sided perspective of the events, although it paid carefully crafted lip service to the criticism of state governments in that period, such as acknowledging the strict border closures and lockdowns that might have been a touch overdone. The report was still designed to reinforce and justify the bureaucratic narrative, ultimately chalking up public outrage and the obvious errors of health departments to misinformation and a lack of data-sharing capabilities. 'If only the federal government had greater control,' they said, and hence the predictable recommendation was to create an Australian CDC. The inquiry report ignored the excess deaths phenomenon that's undoubtedly connected to the COVID-19 vaccines. It dismissed the scepticism of a vaccine that was hurriedly developed as being a result of mis- and disinformation and excused the draconian, heavy-handed mask mandates, lockdowns, border closures and so on as the result of being in an unprecedented situation. It just goes on and on. Aside from its purpose of justifying the narrative for the CDC, it's not worth reading.

At the risk of repeating what I've said many times before, there was nothing unprecedented or unpredictable about what happened during this period. There are no excuses for the manipulative fear-inducing tactics that people, whether they were part of the government or not, used to intimidate others into compliance. It was obvious from the outset that COVID was not what we were being led to believe it was. Those who were intelligent enough to perceive that and brave enough to call it out were of course vilified by all of those in power. When the virus first arrived, there were people who knew that it actually wasn't very dangerous, and the case fatality rates were the same as the regular seasonal flu. If you weren't paying attention to the news, there really wasn't much reason to be concerned. It was only the media hysteria and stern attitudes of government officials that made everyone think differently. Few people under the age of 70 really had anything to worry about when it came to COVID. I have discussed elsewhere those staggering statistics which make the hysteria look completely absurd in hindsight.

All of this is reason enough for opposing this bill. The lesson of COVID is not that we need tighter government control and more opportunity to combat misinformation. The lesson is more like we need to understand that, during the COVID period, health officials wielded too much power and were able to appeal to their own authority rather than real evidence. A good example of this arose when I asked SA health via a freedom-of-information request to provide the actual research undertaken to justify their public health measures, and all I got back was a series of meeting notes about that big—essentially nothing to see.

We've got to understand that practitioners like doctors and nurses who raised questions about the safety of vaccines during that period or said anything which might be interpreted as undermining the government's official stance on the products, whether acting in their professional capacity or speaking privately, were told they would be suspended from their work. 'Trust the science,' amounted to nothing more than, 'Obey.' Yet the academic class congratulated themselves for their perception of their own heroism. I personally met many health professionals who have been excluded from the system they once worked for, for doing what they understood to be their job, which is treating individual patients with approaches which suited them as individuals. That, apparently, posed a threat to public health.

We've got to understand that many regular citizens who questioned the mandates, the lockdowns, the strict border closures and so on were routinely dehumanised and labelled as dangerous and crazy by the media establishment. Many of them even lost their jobs for refusing to receive the treatment—a treatment that had zero long-term safety data and a range of reported adverse effects. Others were pressured into receiving it when they didn't want or need it because of financial concerns. As long as there is any reason to think the Australian CDC is going to promote or endorse such measures, I will not support this bill. There is no reason to think it won't. Simply put, the lesson of COVID is that just because the government says something does not make it true.

To briefly address the bill itself, I will begin by noting that there is no real or concrete rationale for it. It's all pretty broad, generic rhetoric suggesting the need for greater data-sharing capabilities, the need for pandemic preparedness and the need for a public health authority to give clear messaging to Australians. It's not really clear to anyone why the new organisation needs to be developed for things that already seem to fall within the purview of the department of health, or why these things can't happen in the current system.

There is no real cost-benefit analysis provided; however, as usual, the creation of this new organisation is creating a new role—in this case, the CDC director-general, which sounds very important, but this is another person who will be an unelected anointed bureaucrat wielding a good deal of sweeping powers. The director-general will hold powers to direct information to be provided to them, issue emergency data declarations and plan with foreign governments and international organisations. The director-general may request or direct individuals, companies or state entities to provide specific information, with civil penalties for refusal; trigger broad information-sharing across governments and private entities during a severe and immediate or unforeseen threat; and form arrangements with foreign governments and international arrangements on health matters. Suffice to say this is fairly broad and somewhat ambiguous suite of powers for the new role at a time when trust in this sector is at an all-time low.

It's also worth noting that the new Australian CDC is somehow connected to the health effects of climate change, which is predictably defined in the bill as a public health matter. As a technical point, it's worth noting that environmental health is already separately accounted for in the bill, so it seems reductive to talk separately about climate change. It appears to be more of a political gesture than anything else, and it signals that the ideological slant of the CDC will likely have, in the eyes of many Australians, already undermined its credibility.

Very alarmingly, the CDC has embedded One Health as a core guiding principle—that's right—promoting a practical collaboration between doctors, ecologists and wildlife biologists, to name but a few. For anyone listening, have a look at it. Of course, it's supported by the World Health Organization, the UN and many other nations across the world. Don't just take it from me. The new CDC's own website states:

One Health takes an integrated, unifying approach to tackling health challenges that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.

Wow! One has to wonder whether the powers of the Director-General will be used in some politicised. nonsensical effort to control Australians through climate change measures. Even if one grants the necessity of creating this CDC, which seems dubious to begin with, one can't support the bill if concerned about the abuse of the climate change narrative. Will climate change be treated as a severe and immediate threat? Well, guess what? Prepare for your first climate lockdown.

It's most notable that the explanatory memorandum to the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025, which has been co-introduced, states:

Schedule 3 under the Freedom of Information Act … will also be amended to ensure information protected by the secrecy provision in the CDC Bill (personal and commercial in confidence information) would be exempt from disclosure under subsection 38(1) of the FOI Act. This would exempt protected information from publication under the Director-General's duty to publish public health advice. It also ensures protected information is exempt from release under freedom of information requests under the FOI Act.

Simply put, the bill's quietly amending the Freedom of Information Act to protect the CDC from scrutiny. Any information the Director-General deems protected—which might include commercial information or might relate to anything—could be legally exempt from FOI release, which removes the possibility of information disclosure that would hold the CDC to account in future events. Of course, they would just be able to say, 'Trust the science,' to not worry about any FOI inconveniences—it's obvious that this would be inconvenient for the CDC—and to save the effort of having to empirically justify their own decisions.

In conclusion, the establishment of an Australian CDC represents the bricking in of all the mistakes and methodology of the so-called experts throughout the COVID period. The case for its necessity hasn't been adequately made, and the wrongs of the 'expertocracy' during COVID haven't been adequately accounted for; we haven't had a royal commission. We should be culling the bureaucracy at this point, not creating more. For that reason, and for many others, I will be opposing this bill.