A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025
Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (09:44): Thank you to Senators Babet and Antic for this bill, A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Amendment (No Jab No Pay Repeal) Bill 2025, which One Nation wholeheartedly supports. The bill simply provides for the conscientious-objection clause to be restored to the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999, which will allow children who are not fully immunised to access social security.
Specifically, this will allow families whose children may not be vaccinated to access the childcare subsidy and the family tax benefit part A supplement without facing financial penalties. Under this amendment, if a parent files a written declaration of a conscientious objection and an immunisation provider certifies they have discussed the risks and benefits, the child is legally deemed to have met the immunisation requirements.
This provision only applies to age seven, after which the child is deemed to meet the schedule irrespective of vaccination status. This bill is sensible. It's fair.
It restores the fundamental principle that parents make decisions for their children—not governments. Childhood vaccination rates in Australia are currently at a 12-year low, dropping below the federal government's target of 95 per cent. Vaccination rates at 12 months are 90.5 per cent, down 4.3 per cent over the last five years.
At 24 months, the rate is 88.4 per cent, and, at 60 months, the rate is 92.5 per cent. According to the latest data from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, approximately 80,000 children under the age of five are not fully up to date with their standard childhood immunisations. The timing of this fall is no coincidence.
Immunisation was a major casualty of Australia's criminal response to the COVID scandal. It turns out that, when you force vaccination on people and destroy the careers, businesses and, in some cases, marriages of those who refuse, many people do not react with acquiescence. They react with understandable suspicion, distrust, resentment and anger.
They saw the harm people were experiencing from the COVID injections, they look at the harm some childhood vaccines are causing, and they ask, 'What else have our authorities lied to us about?' The reduction in support for vaccination takes two forms. Firstly, parents are increasingly choosing not to give some or all of the schedule to their child. Secondly, parents are delaying the shots until their baby is older.
For instance, in 2025, two in five children received their first measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, dose later than recommended. That's 40 per cent. When looking at vaccination rates across Australia, national averages can be highly misleading.
The national average sits at around 91 per cent, although this does not mean every area is vaccinated to that level. There are growing regional differences. The drop in vaccination rates is not happening evenly across the country.
The National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance map data from the Australian Immunisation Register onto a standard unit called an SA3, statistical area level 3. This is important when comparing vaccination rates in one area against those in another. Five years ago, more than half of all SA3, statistical area level 3, areas had reached or exceeded the 95 per cent target.
Today, the number of SA3 areas meeting that target has plummeted to just 18 per cent—less than one in five. This shows that the fall in confidence in vaccination is happening right across the country. It can be argued that these SA3 areas with vaccination rates below 95 per cent no longer have herd immunity.
Herd immunity has come under scrutiny following the failure of the COVID vaccines, the COVID injections, the COVID gene therapy treatments, to effect herd immunity, despite the level of coercion which went into achieving very high vaccination rates So far, this healthy scientific re-examination has shown measles, mumps, polio and rubella vaccines can achieve herd immunity because their outer shell is stable over time.
Many countries, including the United States, have found the level of preservatives in the MMR vaccine is too high for safety and require those shots to be given separately and spaced out. One Nation supports that position. Viruses like COVID and influenza mutate rapidly and, as society proved with COVID, do not allow for herd immunity.
This was conventional science before our COVID response tore up the rule book and threw out the science. Surprisingly, the areas of lowest vaccination are not in rural and regional areas. They are in growth corridors and inner-city areas.
That's interesting. Conservatives are frequently blamed for lower vaccination rates, yet where are the lowest rates? They're in inner city left-leaning electorates.
Vaccination rates in the bush, though, can be delayed, owing to distance and scheduling. Growth corridors are showing lower vaccination rates, and this is where the babies are and where mothers live with concern about government agencies' actions dishonestly compromising their precious babies' health. The bill does not address the issue of unvaccinated children attending child care.
State governments control that policy. New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia all have laws preventing unvaccinated children attending child care. Queensland allows the centre to make the decision.
The ACT, Tasmania and the Northern Territory have no regulations similar to no-jab no-play. Vaccination status is not relevant to child care. Canberra always makes rules for others that it does not impose on itself.
Recall Commonwealth agencies inhuman, antihuman, immoral, dishonest COVID restrictions and lies contrary to the science. This is interesting. If vaccination status is critical to keeping children safe, we would see New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia having lower disease rates than the ACT, Northern Territory and Tasmania, who allow vaccinated and unvaccinated children to mix.
Not surprisingly—to me anyway—there is no difference in disease rates between the states on average over time. Don't you just love competitive federalism? I sure do!
If you look at the raw infection numbers that the Australian Centre for Disease Control, the CDC, publishes, New South Wales regularly records the highest numbers of whooping cough and measles cases in the country. This may be because Australia does not screen new arrivals for vaccination status. For clarity, new arrivals are those visa types which are counted towards net overseas migration.
Although the same no-jab no-play rule covers children of the net overseas migration and Australian children, when new arrivals apply for permanent visas, they come under the migration medical examination, which does check their vaccination status and requires makeups where required. What's the take-home here? We go to all this trouble to achieve childhood vaccination, then we let in millions of new arrivals and don't even ask their vaccination status.
For the record, India and China have vaccination rates higher than ours. Pakistan is down at 80 per cent, and Somalia and Yemen are at 50 per cent. I've asked about this in Senate estimates hearings and always get nothing answers—crap—and that's the problem.
Unless we can talk honestly about these issues, confidence in health authorities will continue to plummet. Their hubris will be fatal to public health. We also know is that we have a 35-year high in whooping cough, pertussis, notifications and public measles alerts.
Something is going wrong, and we have every right to ask about it. One Nation has concerns around no-jab no-play laws. In medical ethics the relationship between coercion and vaccination is a complex topic, with two competing ethical duties—respect for individual autonomy and the duty to protect public health.
In Australian clinical practice, coercion is against ethical guidelines. Under the Australian Immunisation Handbook for a patient to give legally valid medical consent that consent quote 'must be given voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation'. A doctor cannot ethically use physical force, direct threats or deception to compel a patient to take a vaccine.
Doing so violates the foundational bioethical principle of autonomy, and that's the right of an individual to make decisions about their own body. It is this autonomy Senator Antic's bill seeks to strengthen, with the re-inclusion of a conscientious objection. As such, the bill fits perfectly within the existing legal and ethical vaccination framework.
Here I must make the point that during COVID this fundamental protection against coercion was torn up and ripped to shreds with apparent glee from our health authorities, who revelled in operating in an environment without ethics. The very people who should have displayed ethics instead chose hysteria with an added layer of financial gain. The fundamental rule here is that, if you ignore the rule on informed consent, the risk—in this case, COVID—has to be proportionate to the measures taken.
The vaccine has to be proven safe and effective. The measures taken must be the least necessary to be the least infringement on the code, and, finally, the measures have to be necessary. The COVID immunisation agenda met none of these four tests—not one.
The COVID shots were not tested. The skimpy so-called testing was done on a different version of the vaccine to the one actually sold in Australia. The term 'safe and effective' was two lies.
They were not safe; they were not effective. And we know the health agencies and departments knew that at the time. I'll say it again: we know the health agencies and departments knew at the time that they were not safe and effective.
They were not necessary. Vaccinating for influenza has never worked and did not work in the case of COVID, and, lastly, they were not the least infringement on the code. Ivermectin and similar accessible, affordable, safe drugs were proven safe and effective yet were banned by our health authorities.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, Ahpra, should have acted to defend the rights of patients and stood in defence of informed consent, which is supposedly an Ahpra objective. Instead, they chose to police medical practitioners to ensure none dared to follow the Australian Immunisation Handbook guidelines. Ahpra tried heavily and determinedly to ensure health practitioners did not comply with the Hippocratic oath.
These dishonest travesties Ahpra continue today. Secondly, childhood vaccines have never been tested for safety against an inert placebo—never—which is what is required by the ICH Guideline for Good Clinical Practice E6, which Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration, the TGA, has ratified. Australian vaccines have not been tested against this standard.
Instead, the TGA, in Senate estimates hearings, relies on the lack of reported serious adverse events to assume vaccines are safe. Despite there being high levels of adverse events such as autism that parents associate with the vaccines, the authorities, with no examination, brush off that the cause is vaccines. It's this, more than anything else, that's causing a loss of confidence in vaccination.
A One Nation government will require this safety testing to be done and, given the significance of the exercise, fund the trials, in the public interest. Finally, under America's health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC in America, announced an unprecedented revision of the routine childhood immunisation guidelines, shrinking approved vaccines from 17 to 11.
Australia has 14. This move is currently blocked in American courts after the pharmaceutical industry fought back. I hope the measure is approved, as it will provide a very immediate answer to the question of a potential link between childhood vaccines and adverse events that agencies with connections to big pharma currently and blindly do not accept as being vaccine related.
Greg Beattie's excellent book, FoolingOurselves, provides a proper statistical evaluation showing that the incidence of childhood diseases and their effects plummeted before the vaccines were released. That means that vaccines were not the cause of the near eradication of the diseases. Rather, it seems that improved hygiene, improved sanitation and improved nutrition were the causes of falling disease incidence.
It means that there will be no harm in not forcing childhood vaccines—no harm. In summary, parents have every right to be wary of the harm these products may be doing to their children. They have every right to exercise their religious or conscientious objections to forced vaccination.
They should not be treated differently for not having vaccinated their children in whole or in part. And childcare centres should be free to make the decision to accept or not accept vaccinated or unvaccinated children. One Nation will proudly support this bill.