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

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (09:34): I rise to speak against this bill, the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025, which seeks to reopen a loophole this parliament closed for good reason almost 10 years ago. This was a decision of the former coalition government that helped push five-year-olds' vaccination coverage in this country to over 95 per cent by 2020.

In 2015, the coalition introduced no jab, no pay. The measure removed conscientious objection as a valid reason to opt out of childhood vaccination while still receiving family assistance payments. This was not a new principle.

Full immunisation had already been a requirement for family assistance payments since 1998, so we were not inventing a new form of conditionality. We were closing one specific loophole that had grown from a marginal exemption into a genuine leak in a system that was putting other families at risk. Access to taxpayer funded payment has never been an unconditional entitlement in this country.

It's a privilege which comes with some basic responsibilities attached. The policy protects those who, for genuine medical reasons, find themselves in a position where they're not able to be vaccinated and rely on herd vaccination to protect their health. It protects infants too young to be vaccinated themselves, children who are immunocompromised and pregnant women who rely entirely on the choices of the families around them.

The then minister for social services, Christian Porter, drew on his own family history with polio, as his cousin was one of the last children in Australia to contract it. His point was that a hardwon protection can be treated as optional once the generation that lived through the disease it prevented is no longer the one making the decisions. The results of this policy speak for themselves.

By 2020, five-year-old coverage had reached the target of 95 per cent, while one-year-old coverage had climbed to 94.8 per cent, nearly reaching the same milestone. That was the result of removing conscientious objection and putting the onus on every family to make an informed, active choice on childhood vaccinations. I want to be clear about what this policy did and did not do.

No jab, no pay has never mandated vaccination. As Tony Abbott put it on the day the policy was announced, people can, if they like, object to having their kids vaccinated, but, if you don't have your children vaccinated, you won't qualify for the supplement. No family has ever been forced to vaccinate a child.

No jab, no pay is not a mandate. It does not compel anyone. It simply does not extend a taxpayer funded subsidy on the basis of a choice, and that is the entirety of the extent of it.

That distinction matters more now than it did a decade ago, because the ground has shifted under us in exactly the way it had before we acted in 2015. Coverage that had peaked over 95 per cent in 2020 has fallen every year since. The Australian Medical Association's analysis this year found a concerning downturn across every immunisation program in this country.

As the AMA president, Dr Danielle McMullen, put it, we are already seeing hospitals operating beyond their capacity. Now is not the time to let more infectious diseases back into the community. We are already living with the consequences.

Whooping cough notifications reached their highest level in 35 years across 2024 and 2025. Measles cases in Australia have been climbing sharply too. Reopening conscientious objection now, at the exact moment coverage is falling and diseases are returning, would not be a neutral act.

It would help accelerate that decline. I ask every member in this place to think about this seriously, because the impact of this proposal would not just sit with the individual families who make the decision. It sits with the infant too young to be vaccinated in the same library storytelling group, the immunocompromised child at the same cinema session and the pregnant woman in the same community.

Conscientious objection was not removed to punish parents. It was removed because it was used to bypass a system that protects children who have no say in the matter at all. Now is not the time to step back.

The coalition will oppose this bill.