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

The final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned was handed down last week. The royal commission that New Zealand's prime minister during COVID, Jacinda Ardern, started was a cover-up until the new government made it slightly more fair dinkum. The report was framed politically, praising all involved as running one of the world's best COVID responses. To say they didn't harm people as badly as most other countries is not a compliment, and even that's unsupportable, based on testimony to the commission. One Nation is not letting go of this issue, because there is another pandemic on the way, just as soon as the gain-of-function research is completed and the inevitable lab leaks occur. Australia is running gain-of-function research at the CSIRO facility in Geelong, including on new strains of Ebola—insane.

The report did include substantial criticism of New Zealand's mistakes in their response, although the report did not give it prominence. The report focused only on process errors—not medical but process errors—especially advice not reaching decision-makers and the repeated failure of politicians to follow the advice they did get. It turns out they were not following the science after all. The commission examined so-called vaccines, lockdowns, testing and economic responses from February 2021 to October 2022 to assess decisions taken on the basis of information available at the time. Many decisions that we know today were wrong were not investigated, because that information was not available at the time, nor did the commission hold politicians accountable for making decisions which clearly flew in the face of decency and common sense.

And the royal commission failed to address the COVID injection's long-term medical outcomes. Massive increases in cancer rates, myocarditis, brain function, permanently elevated mortality levels, harm to children's emotional education and development—none were subject to rigorous inquiry. Nothing in this report would stop a future government from repeating key steps of their failed response, because the true extent of the harm was not subject to detailed longitudinal medical study during the inquiry.

Here are the main findings and the main failings in the government response that the commission did find: Firstly—youth vaccine mandates for 12- to 17-year-olds. On 9 December 2021, the COVID-19 vaccine technical advisory group gave clear advice to the government that the risks of COVID-19 transmission amongst under-18s were 'insufficient to justify mandating a two-dose schedule' and that they may 'add unnecessary risk of myocarditis'. This specific advice never made it to the right people. As a result, the injection mandates for education workers and children over 12 remained in place, wrongly. The commission called this a significant failing yet did not require those who received the guidance to explain why they chose to ignore it, nor why the advisory body that made the guidance chose to keep their mouths shut. The former director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, was knighted and is now at the World Health Organization running the International Health Regulations. How come? In the public service, silence is a golden ticket.

Secondly—the Auckland lockdown extension in late 2021. Auckland was kept under alert level 4 for 32 days longer than the director-general of health advised. These 32 days were over Christmas, causing massive social harm during a Christian holiday. The commission notes that this contributed to unnecessary social and economic disruption for businesses and families. That's a huge understatement. Jacinda Ardern clearly shares Prime Minister Albanese's desire to break the bonds of family, community and Christianity in order to usher in their communist utopia of scarcity, censorship and control.

Thirdly—communication of risks. The failure to clearly communicate risks around COVID injection harms, especially myocarditis in young people, eroded trust in the government and in medical professions. This is why the Albanese government is rigging the mis- and disinformation inquiry now underway—to prove the need for mis- and disinformation censorship laws, to ensure the government is the only source of information during the next emergency.

Fourthly—vaccine mandates. The commission found that there was 'insufficient monitoring' of impacts around job losses and exemptions, although the commission did not scrutinise adverse effects from the deadly COVID shots. Their process was to accept the health department's explanation of the adverse events documented on the New Zealand version of the Database of Adverse Event Notifications. The commission found that decisions to continue or remove mandates were 'not well-informed by data'. No bloody kidding! Just not informed!

And Australia has committed this grave mistake. Perhaps we did it even worse in this country.

Tonight, I'm sharing with the Senate new evidence, published last week, using Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration's own documentation, which suggests that the TGA may have committed malfeasance in office. Last week, Paul Rekaris presented this evidence, published on SSRN, the world's largest social science research network, based on his four years of freedom of information requests and investigations, using the TGA's own data. I'll say it again: 'using the TGA's own data'. Titled Documentation gap analysis: independent audit of TGA COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring plan, the paper used thousands of pages of data, covering 68.4 million injection doses, and audit standards from the Australian National Audit Office and the international standard for auditing, ISO 19011.

Here's some background. The Commonwealth signed formal bilateral agreements with Australian states and territories that established governance frameworks requiring systematic reporting of vaccine safety and surveillance data, including adverse event monitoring via the TGA. These agreements implemented the Australian COVID-19 Vaccination Policy, which National Cabinet endorsed in November 2020, and gave operational effect through the TGA's February 2021 'COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring plan'. Remember that title. The states relied on that plan. The public relied on that plan. Yet the TGA did not properly implement that plan. They weren't even close.

This is at the heart of the cover-up of COVID injection harm. The monitoring, called pharmacovigilance, had to be done according to the plan. Monitoring was not done—and people died.

The ministers are culpable. Under the Cabinet Handbook, 15th edition, paragraph 25, ministers must carry out policies that cabinet has determined, and, as recorded in cabinet minutes, portfolio agencies must act on cabinet decisions. This binds the TGA, as a portfolio agency under the Department of Health and Aged Care, to implement the enhanced monitoring commitments.

This is a brief outline now of the evidence of their failure. Firstly, in September 2024, when the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner directed the TGA, the TGA identified no implementation records for the vaccine safety monitoring plan—a position the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner confirmed in Decision 2025 AICmr 54. Secondly, vaccine safety monitoring was managed through routine 'day-to-day processes', contradicting the enhanced monitoring requirement attached to provisional vaccine approval. Thirdly, of 19 audited plan outputs, only three have complete implementation documentation, 10 are partially documented and six have no documentation at all—only one-sixth compliance. Fourthly, the TGA investigated 148 safety signals, called adverse events, and took 57 regulatory actions. They have published no documentation linking specific signals to specific actions or explaining why they took or did not take action—none. Fifthly, ISO 19011 conformity assessment revealed systematic implementation failure by the TGA. Objective 2 was signal detection—the thing they were supposed to be monitoring closely. Across eight outputs, they achieved zero per cent full implementation, and, across two outputs in governance, achieved zero per cent.

The evidence continues to pile up. Last week, Dr Helmut Sterz, former Pfizer Europe chief toxicologist, testified before Germany's Bundestag coronavirus inquiry commission, saying that the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine carcinogenicity and mutagenicity tests were not done. Reproductive toxicity tests were defective. This violated standard protocols and enabled untested mass rollout. Yet billions of dollars in sales rolled in. Essential toxicity studies were sacrificed to speed, with no acceptable reasons, with the result that the approval led to prohibited human trials. Sterz cited post-marketing data showing over 2,133 German deaths in the first two months, estimating up to 60,000 German deaths after adjusting for underreporting, while noting that increased age-adjusted mortality from 2021 onwards contradicted claims of a positive benefit-risk ratio.

It was wrong to inject people with these things. Pfizer's management's confession is damning. How much more evidence do you need? Call a royal commission now.

Finally, I appreciate that some citizens want COVID as an issue put behind us. We can't do that, because big pharma and their TGA will do it all again. We must hound down those responsible and hold them accountable.