Senate debates

Tuesday, 23 November 2021

Adjournment

COVID-19: Vaccination

7:31 pm

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

Most Australians take it for granted that denying services for basic rights based on gender, race, sexuality or religious or political views is wrong. This is the very reason that Australia has antidiscrimination laws—laws that protect people from being refused services and employment over these very issues. That is to be expected of a liberal democracy like Australia. Tragically, it's ironic that after several decades of building upon antidiscrimination legislation it's only taken a relatively short time for Australia to be transformed into a two-tiered society on the grounds of medical discrimination.

For the simple act of refusing a COVID vaccine, Australians are being refused entry into businesses, denied basic services, having their movements restricted, losing their jobs and having their careers ruined. First it was nurses, then physios, then dentists and chiropractors. Then last week in South Australia the health bureaucracy mandated teachers. This week, it's cabbies and Uber drivers. Those who refuse COVID vaccines are being marginalised for no reason other than their refusal to comply with the whims of a power-hungry unelected health bureaucracy around the country, and history doesn't look kindly on these actions.

Justifying such medical discrimination in the name of science is incoherent. If the argument is that these vaccines protect you then we have no reason to be worried about unvaccinated people, and vaccine passports are rendered useless by the fact that vaccinated people can still spread the contagion. Why then are unvaccinated people being hunted by our institutions and the bullyboys of the corporate world? Australia cannot become a nation in which people are required to present private medical information to fully participate in society. Such processes are a hallmark of totalitarian regimes like Soviet Russia. They are a tool wielded to pressure people into compliance.

Travelling interstate, ordering a cup of coffee, going to the movies, visiting an elderly parent or being allowed to work should never require an unwanted medical procedure, whether it's safe and effective or not. The right to live and work without being subjected to a medical procedure or the whims of a tinpot bureaucrat must be restored and protected. The borders must be open for all people, regardless of their private medical decisions. We can't pretend that Australia is a free country until these steps are taken.

Our freedoms are nurtured and defended so that they're passed on to the next generation but they're being trampled on, supposedly in the name of health and safety. The assault on basic human rights and dignity has been astounding. Rallies all across the nation last weekend drew hundreds of thousands of Australians—not antivaxxers, not far right extremists and not white supremacists, as the lazy media and the Left have called them. My office has in fact been bombarded with emails and calls from people across the country who have been forced to choose between taking a medical procedure that they don't want and keeping their jobs. It's a great shame that our nation has allowed this to happen.

Recent polling commissioned by my office shows that nearly 28 per cent—nearly a third—of South Australians have felt pressured into taking one of these treatments. That may be upwards of 400,000 South Australians. Those pushing medical discrimination today will be remembered in much the same way that segregationists were remembered in the past. Sir Robert Menzies once said:

The rarest form of courage, I think, in the world, is moral courage. The courage that a man has when he is prepared to form his view of the truth and to pursue it, when he's not running around the corner every five minutes to say, 'Is this going to be popular?'

I wonder what Sir Robert would say about us today?