The vaccine mandate issue continues to dog the government — and a worried prime minister is running a mile from it. The consequences may end up being deeply damaging for many businesses and hurt the recovery — if we ever get one while the NSW government lets the Delta variant run rampant through Sydney.
Last week Scott Morrison’s position on businesses requiring employees to be vaccinated was to play observer-in-chief, promising only that the government would stand by and watch. To be overgenerous, he could have been forgiven for that line given the issue had blown up more quickly than anyone thought. Most of us still haven’t been able to get a jab even if we want to. But cannery SPC’s announcement it would introduce a mandate for employee vaccines by October forced the issue.
Since then, however, Morrison has actually hardened his position on business vaccine mandates. On Monday he described them as a “mandatory vaccination program by the government, by stealth”.
“We are not going to seek to impose a mandatory vaccination program in this country by some other means,” he said.
This is another candidate for the long list of Morrison lies and falsehoods, because allowing business to require employees to be vaccinated would hardly be a mandatory vaccination program by stealth. The case for allowing businesses to require vaccines is rock solid: if they have a physical workplace they have a duty of care to their employees around safety in that workplace, and one to their customers if they interact with the public.
Businesses are already required through various forms of regulation to provide safe working environments. We have safety mandates, we have food quality mandates, we have qualification mandates. The fact that you can’t work as an electrician without the appropriate training and certification isn’t some outrageous infringement on personal freedom, it’s a basic to ensure the safety of colleagues and the public.
So resistant is the government to providing any assistance or guidance to employers, however, that there’s confusion about whether they can ask employees if they’ve been vaccinated, with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s advice riddled with weasel words.
This isn’t some accidental feature of the industrial relations system, but the result of a deliberate policy by the government to avoid the issue, leaving businesses in the lurch and likely stymieing investment and hiring plans, endangering workers and customers and creating the risk of outbreaks once restrictions begin being lifted.
Business is naturally crying foul, for once justifiably, and The Australian Financial Review — finally working out this is an issue after Crikey raised it last week — editorialised yesterday on the need for certainty, pitching the issue in terms of the “Team Australia” drivel it has been peddling throughout the pandemic.
But why did Morrison harden his rhetoric against mandates between Friday and Monday? Normally the government is happy to fall into line with business demands but Morrison — who needs no excuse to avoid leading anyway — is fenced in by extremists and denialists in his own ranks.
There are the usual suspects like pandemic denialist George Christensen, who made his umpteenth threat to cross the floor on vaccine passports. Morrison is terrified of offending Christensen and will say and do anything to avoid encouraging him to split from the LNP in his last months in politics.
But there are threats closer to home on the issue. At the weekend, NSW state Liberal MP Tanya Davies attacked her own government for requiring tradies from selected local government areas with high infection rates to be vaccinated or not return to work on construction sites. She promised to introduce a bill to outlaw vaccine mandates.
Davies explicitly said Morrison’s “watching” wasn’t good enough and he should ban mandates.
The MP — who tried to bring NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian down over her failure to stop the bill decriminalising abortion in NSW — is a Christian fundamentalist from the NSW hard right and a government advocate for the scandal-plagued Hillsong, with links to the Australian Christian Lobby. And she’s not alone within Morrison’s home branch in wanting to outlaw mandates.
That Morrison shifted his rhetoric to greater opposition on Monday speaks much about how Davies reflects extremist views within Liberal ranks as well as the wingnut sections of the LNP in Queensland.
The result will likely be fewer jobs, less investment and a slower recovery — not to mention more illness and deaths.
Does Australia need a vaccine mandate for workers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity
We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again.
Scottys default position is incompetence and cover ups.
Tourism Australia?
Tourism nz?
Does anyone detect a pattern here?
The next disaster distracts from the last. Why do journos write articles that suggest each #scottyfrommarketing stuff up is an isolated event?
So given that all employers have a duty of care to their employees, which is why (for example) smoking is banned in offices/restaurants etc – why would this be any different? By not requiring their employees to be vaccinated…..they put their other staff at risk….and fall foul of Workplace Health and Safety Laws. Seems pretty clear cut?
It sure makes sense, but any change in status quo will cause shouting from the fringes. Banning smoking in offices was no easy task, with diehard smokers arguing furiously that personal freedoms were being tossed aside, and the health of others wasn’t important. That battle has been won, but has to be fought again on other issues, such as COVID vaccinations. And that’s before we even get started on the discussion of climate change.
Drink driving & smoking near others are perfect templates for understanding how well funded resistance to unarguable reforms can be drawn out to unconscionable lengths – see also slavery, child labour and climate change.
Follow the money – cui bono?
And open to litigation if people get sick?
And what of their Public Liability Insurance? Will premiums rise if workers are not vaccinated?
Because it falls into another tricky grey area: does this worker have to be in the office to actually perform their job? No? Well, then. Unless the home in question has a serious safety concern, it is in everyone’s health and safety interests to leave that person working from home. That means no mandatory vaccine. But it also means the commercial property lobby continue to squeal, as do incompetent bosses who desperately want people dragged into the office so that they can feel important.
Time to be shot of this useless PM and his willing pandering to the loony Right.. Have the GG reprise ‘the Dismissal’ of ’75.
Yep, or a recontesting of the Federal LNP govt’s leadership via a party room spill now!
A hand-brake on progress.
Can’t wait to see what XR will come up with next “DUTY OF… “
How is this even a question ?
Of course employers should insist on vaccination in the same way that they insist on (for example) an alcohol and drug free workplace
This is so in order that the duty of care to co workers and the public they interact with can be maintained
The alternative is so absurd as to be risible as for example no policy on drugs and alcohol at work…
Hey guys if you want you can get stoned/pissed and operate machinery and that’s ok because it is your inviolable right as an individual to do so
How does it get to this? How do the loopy right wing so called Christians get such sway?
Happy Clappies are hardly Christian given that the prosperity gospel rides over the top of the Christian Gospels and the Command from the BOSS himself to love your neighbour as yourself!
They only love believers and are not Christians.
Scott Morrison has always prided himself in doing nothing. It’s far easier then to defend a position when you haven’t acted and, besides, doing nothing takes far less effort.
Unfortunately for Morrison, the normal rules of politics don’t apply during a pandemic. The non-NSW states have shown that firm action is always more effective – both in containing COVID and appealing to the electorate. No wonder Morrison tried to ride the coattails of the states with respect to lockdowns – but as he is painfully finding out, he can’t do that as well as keeping the lunatic fringe happy.
You’d think that doing nothing would require less effort, but look how hard Morrison has to work to give the impression that he’s doing something while doing nothing. If we could get somebody with those energy levels and a functioning brain we could really be on to something.
My dad always told me it’s much easier to do the job properly the first time. It was handed down to him from grandfather to father etc for god knows how many generations. If we had a family motto it would be that. Of course he was right, much easier to do the job properly the first time.
Same with climate change, the earlier we get cracking the cheaper and easier it is. But no, we have the Prevaricator-in-Chief leading us.