A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025

Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (09:01): . The A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025 is a bill which stands for the principle of conscientious objection. The bill seeks to restore freedom of choice for parents who, for personal, philosophical, religious or medical reasons, elect not to have a child receive a vaccine from the standard vaccine schedule.

It would achieve this by repealing the changes made to the Social Services Legislation Amendment (No Jab, No Pay) Bill 2015. In 2015, the so-called no-jab no-pay amendment made certain family assistance benefits conditional on meeting vaccine and vaccination requirements by amending the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999. Access to the childcare benefit, childcare rebate and family tax benefit part A became conditional on a child meeting all the immunisation requirements.

Childcare benefit and childcare rebate have since been replaced by the child care subsidy. No-jab no-pay removed the conscientious objection exemption regarding being eligible for these forms of government assistance for families, meaning that, if parents want to receive those benefits, their child's vaccination schedule must be fully up to date. Now, the removal of the conscientious objection against vaccination to receive these benefits is, in my view, needlessly cruel and coercive as a measure designed to financially pressure parents, many of whom are of a low-socioeconomic background, into having their children vaccinated, even if they hold personal, philosophical, religious or indeed medical objections to doing so.

A decision to vaccinate a child, wherever such reasons exist, should be a personal decision. Contrary to what our modern healthcare apparatus seems to think, legitimate reasons for conscientious objections exist. Indeed, that was the consensus in 1999, with the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999, so it wasn't actually all that long ago that the right to conscientious objection was considered important in this country.

The no-jab no-pay laws erroneously assumed that there could not exist a genuine reason for conscientious objections to vaccination. It was simply disregarded. Bear in mind we're not talking about refusing every single vaccine but simply not being up to date.

Parents could refuse one single vaccine that they have concerns about for whatever reason in the multivaccine schedule, and thereby be rendered ineligible for the child care subsidy and the family tax benefit. Before discussing this further, it's worth pausing to reflect on the question of why there was a conscientious objection clause in the first place. In the late 1990s, it was deemed necessary by parliament to allow parents to reserve that right.

In fact, it seems to have been largely uncontroversial that access to childcare assistance shouldn't be impaired by conscientious objection. And, as recently as the late nineties, both sides of the Australian parliament would have characterised that as needlessly coercive and a cruel measure. It was regarded as an important right for reasons that really shouldn't require explanation but sadly do require an explanation in the current environment.

It should be obvious that, for a start, decisions about vaccination should primarily lie with the parents and not with government. When the government gets to unilaterally decide the conditions of receiving medical interventions and treatments, such as this, a precedent of government unilaterally making those decisions is set. Also established in 2015 was the precedent that compliance with arbitrary government requirements should be personal and that parental decisions allow greater access to benefits and so on.

That creates a two-tiered society in which those who object and have reasonable reasons for doing so are denied help. The government and the pharmaceutical companies have now decided for you that the benefits outweigh the risk—and that's that. If you're the slightest bit sceptical about even one vaccine on the multi-vaccine schedules, then you're cut off from the government's payment.

Now, my point here isn't whether or not there's one particular vaccine on the schedule that's safe or another that's not. It's about necessity, and it's about the ability for parents to conscientiously object. My point is that it is obviously the case that a vaccine might not be as safe as we're told because things have happened all the way through the history of these interventions.

It's plausible that people could have medical concerns or concerns of another kind, particularly in today's financially challenging society, and be coerced into ignoring them because they simply need the money. That is wrong. It's morally wrong.

It's obviously wrong, and it literally shouldn't require any explanation. Hence, this bill should not be the slightest bit controversial. The no-jab, no-pay laws should never actually have been passed.

The criteria for conscientious objections are for reasons that are personal, philosophical, religious or medical. Parents would need to speak with their family doctor and receive guidance, as we encourage, on the risks and the benefits of their decision, but if that decision—and we live in a free society—should lie with anyone, it should lie with the parents.

That is reasonable. To give an example of why one might conscientiously object from a religious standpoint, there are Christians who hold concerns about the connections between modern vaccines and cell-lines derived from abortions used by vaccine manufacturers. To be clear, different people hold different perspectives on that question.

Not everybody who shares Christian views has that concern, but, at the end of the day, there are those, for reasons of conscience, who would simply not prefer to rely on this technology, especially for relatively mild conditions like chickenpox. Now, whether you personally agree with that decision or not, that's a decision that parents should have the right to make.

I think it's evident that one's conscience shouldn't be compelled on this due to financial coercion. A legal system that's comfortable with overriding people's consciences in this way runs the risk of becoming corrupt. Before no-jab, no-pay, parents had to seek the guidance of healthcare professionals, as I said.

In contemporary Australia, there are many parents who would simply have preferred not to vaccinate their children at all with a particular vaccine, but who have been financially pressured into doing so. As I said: that is wrong. If no-jab, no-pay doesn't amount to undue pressure, then, in my view, nothing does.

It would, in fact, be irresponsible to assume that the government and pharmaceutical companies only have your best interests at heart, and then, on that basis, you should simply agree with them on every point. Well, it seems to me that that amounts to less scrutiny than what was in place before the mandatory guidance of healthcare professionals who actually knew you and knew your family.

Assuming that there is one monolithic concept of 'the science' is just foolish. Different jurisdictions can have different approaches, and it makes sense for there to be some leeway. In fact, it wasn't until very recently that the United Kingdom incorporated the chickenpox vaccine into their schedule.

But whatever one's reason for conscientious objection, at the end of the day, this is simply an illiberal policy. We don't even really need to argue about a hypothetical scenario caused by this precedent, because we've already lived through it in recent years. We saw the logical trajectory of this precedent play out during the COVID period, and just six years ago, many Australians were told that if they refused to have two doses of an experimental injection that didn't actually prevent infection or transmission of COVID—a vaccine itself responsible for a wide variety of adverse events, including death—then they wouldn't be able to work.

That's precisely the kind of scenario that people are concerned about with this no-jab, no-pay law. The reality turned out to be much more dystopian, and it happened much more quickly than anybody could have anticipated. We saw how quickly the slope became slippery once an illiberal, irrational and callous principle was entrenched in our laws.

I hope the Senate will support this principle of conscientious objection. I hope they'll remember the abuses of the pandemic period and be able to see that those were made because of the deletion of conscientious objections in the first place. When we dispense with the conscientious objection principle, we dispense with a vital principle of opposing the abuse of power—something that the left of politics is not always that across.

I hope the Senate will elect to support hardworking families who, for valid reasons, conscientiously object, perhaps not even to every vaccine on the schedule, instead of agreeing with a system that has demonstrated that it's okay to coerce Australians into decisions, like we saw during COVID. Over the last few years, I've received much correspondence from concerned parents about this issue.

I know those parents are not reckless or careless about the health of their children. Contrary to what the media would have you believe, these parents are thoughtful, intelligent people who want the best for their children. A few short decades ago, their concerns and their right to have these concerns would have been accepted.

Well, what happened? We need to act against the slide of governments into every aspect of our life and preserve our liberties while we still have them. The way in which legitimate and well-founded conscientious objection has been demonised is disgraceful, and we owe it to Australians and Australian families to right that wrong by passing this bill.