A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025
Senator WHITTEN (Western Australia) (09:38): I rise to support the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025. Compulsion has become commonplace. When a government can't convince people of a program's benefit, it turns to coercion.
That is the story of no jab, no pay, and it is why this bill is before us. The changes proposed here are not new. They restore rights that families held until 1 January 2016.
Before those amendments, a parent with a conscientious objection to the standard vaccination schedule could still receive childcare payments and family tax benefit part A. This bill puts that pathway back. It allows people to make an informed choice about the medical treatment their children receive.
A conscientious objection, as this bill defines it, is a personal, philosophical, religious or medical belief that a vaccination, under the latest edition of the standard schedule, should not take place. A recognised immunisation provider must certify in writing that they have discussed the benefits and the risks with the parent. The parent must then declare the objection in writing.
The parent is informed. The parent is then empowered to make the decision they believe is best for their child. This is an informed choice the parent is empowered to make.
Prior to the changes to the law, there were between 30,000 and 40,000 conscientious objectors registered in Australia. With the passage of that amendment, thousands of families had to give up their right to choose. Over time, this place has layered law upon law that takes autonomy away from parents.
In the vast majority of cases, parents are the people best placed to decide what is right for their children. For decades, the government has stayed out of the inner life of the family. We let parents do their job and parent.
We let them make the decisions personally, because blanket rules can go awry. Governments can always go sideways and the majority can get it wrong. A free society does not treat the family as subordinated to the state.
The family unit is the very building block of a free society. I understand that people have strong feelings about vaccination. Many believe some sacrifice of individual autonomy is required for the greater good.
We have already seen what happens when we ignore autonomy and coercion takes its place. COVID-19 was the ultimate social experiment in that method. We learnt what happens when government promotes compulsion, ignores bodily autonomy and encourages people to treat one another as disease vectors.
We were told the vaccinations were safe and effective. We watched manufacturers rake in $200 billion in revenue while experts, media and politicians pushed every citizen towards the needle or towards punishment and ostracism. People were locked out of ordinary life.
They were shunned if they had not been vaccinated. I was working away when Western Australia locked its borders. I was kept out of my own state and treated as a threat.
But, slowly, through the great work of citizen journalists and sceptics that refused to be silenced, the truth came out. It turns out these vaccines weren't safe, as we'd been promised, and they certainly weren't effective. But by then it was too late for people who had been injured by a vaccine they never wanted.
Many would never have taken that jab if the price of refusal had not been their job, their travel or their place in the community. They couldn't even see family members that were dying in hospital. That is what horse-trading rights looks like—'Give up bodily autonomy and you may have your freedom of movement back.' That is a bargain struck under duress and false compliance.
But, when the truth came out, all those responsible said that there was never any compulsion. We have not forgotten. There will be a reckoning.
This amendment is a step in the right direction. The worst feature of the current law is that it rations the right to choose by income. Families who are not eligible for family payments can refuse the schedule and keep their money because the state is not holding a payment over their heads.
Families who need a hand up are told that assistance comes at a price. They have to surrender the right to decide what is placed in their child's body or lose the support that's designed for the worst off. We said we would help those families.
Then we attached a medical condition to the help. If the science is as settled as advocates claim, they should be able to win the argument without docking the payments of low-income parents. If the schedule is so clearly in a child's interest, persuasion and information should be enough.
There is also a practical point. The 2016 changes did two things at once. They abolished conscientious objection and they extended the immunisation test well beyond early childhood.
This bill restores the objection and treats a child aged seven or older as meeting the requirement. That is a return to the principle that family assistance should not be a running penalty through adolescence for a decision made when a child was small. None of this requires anyone to change their own mind about vaccination.
Parents who want to vaccinate will still be able to vaccinate. Doctors will still advise. The National Immunisation Program will still exist.
What would change is the state's willingness to use the family payment system as a bludgeon against parents. If we learned anything from the last few years, let it be this. There is no emergency so tidy and no majority so confident that we should force people to give up the right to choose what is right for them and their families.
Rights that exist only for people who can afford to lose a payment are not rights; they are privileges. This bill returns the right to choose. It removes a form of government coercion that falls hardest on the families we claim to help.
This bill should be supported.