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

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (09:24): Today I will be speaking to the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025. The Greens will not be supporting this bill today. This policy, now in effect for over a decade, requires families to be up to date with their immunisation in order to access family tax benefit part A supplements and childcare assistance fee support.

It requires parents or guardians to make sure their kids are up to date with their jabs. Vaccinations have been transformative for public health across the world. They have saved, undoubtedly, many, many Australian lives.

The Australian Greens support universal access to primary health care and to prevention services, which do include reliable and affordable access to vaccinations. Immunisation is one of the great success stories of the modern world and of public health. The evidence tells us clearly that vaccines protect against a range of viral diseases, bacterial infections and insect-borne, parasitic-borne and bloodborne infections.

Australia has an excellent record of achievement in the prevention of disease through immunisation. These are the facts. We have seen a reduction in the instances of and deaths occurring from a range of diseases including measles, polio, tetanus and diphtheria.

This policy doesn't remove the right to make a decision not to immunise. We all have that choice. What it does is put a financial cost on that decision.

I do want to say though, as has been said when this policy was established 10 years ago, that there is a concern—and we share the concern—that this policy places a financial penalty on people receiving income support payments. Higher income families are less affected by this policy because they do not receive the family tax benefit. We all know that in this cost-of-living crisis our income support payments are much, much too low in this country, and placing an extra financial impost on people who need financial assistance has the potential to exacerbate inequity among people doing it tough.

This is especially unfair. This is a reality that we must acknowledge. When the majority of parents or guardians who have not met vaccination requirements for their children face structural barriers to accessing health care, it is about structural barriers rather than access active refusal.

It is unfair that our primary healthcare system has let them down and that they are being penalised as a result of this failure for not accessing health care. While mistrust can be a factor for some people, research has shown that larger contributing factors are the cost of appointments, limited appointment availability, healthcare professionals not being available in their area and a lack of opportunities to have discussions about vaccination with their healthcare providers.

This is yet another reason that the government must urgently increase the rebate for GP consultations beyond 20 minutes. You can't have a fulsome conversation with a concerned parent or guardian about risks and benefits in a short period of time. You have got to build that trust.

You've got to have that conversation. To do that and to enable healthcare professionals to do that, you've got to compensate them properly. The government should be increasing availability to and investment in health care to ensure that it is more accessible for people across this country.

We need catch-up campaigns. We need local initiatives to improve coverage. We need home visiting programs.

These are just a few examples of the things that we need this government to address and to fund in order to remove barriers to access to health care. As I said, we need government to raise rebates for longer GP consults, fund better rural health services, invest in public health education and ensure First Nations controlled health services are adequately resourced.

All of these measures will ensure that primary health teams are able to reach kids across the country, including in regional areas. Additionally, the Greens would like to see the government invest in and commission an independent research study to look at the impacts of this policy. It has been in effect for over a decade.

There have been some, but limited, academic evaluations of it, and I think the public would benefit from having an independent study into its impacts. This would give the community confidence in policy settings and the administration of this program, and it would help us make informed decisions about whether settings related to this program need to change, especially in relation to its impacts on driving inequality.

Let me be clear: I do not believe that this bill is being put forward in good faith. Throwing out this policy with no evidence supporting us to do so and with no continued investment in positive encouragement or addressing the public health gaps that are so clear in the healthcare system can leave us with only one conclusion: that this is a scare campaign put forward by people who want to spread fear for their own political purpose with the express intent of reducing vaccination rates and putting kids at risk of diseases, including polio, diphtheria, measles and mumps, just to name a few.

As such, the Australian Greens will not be supporting Senator Antic's bill today, and I would draw that particular section of the Liberal Party's attention and the attention of the entire Senate to one particular fact, and that is that right now the US health secretary, RFK Jr, is encouraging American citizens to be vaccinated for measles as the US experiences its largest measles outbreak in 35 years.

This is the scientific reality on the ground right now. And while I am at it and while I have this opportunity to reinforce and underline some scientific facts, I will say that, after decades of rigorous scientific research, there is still no evidence whatsoever that vaccines cause autism. On that note, I bid this individual and his law fare bloody well.