THE Turnbull government’s punitive approach to enforcing mandatory vaccinations breaches children’s rights, but the Human Rights Commission remains silent on the issue.
Human rights expert Paula Gerber, a professor at Monash University, told the Herald this week it was clear the withholding of financial entitlements from parents who refuse to inoculate their children breaches numerous articles of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.
She stresses she supports vaccination and jabbed her own kids, but says children should not be used as a “weapon” to force parents to toe the line and Australia should abide by treaties it signs.
The convention states children must not be punished for the beliefs or actions of their parents, and that governments should go out of their way to ensure children fully benefit from social security. It says children should have a say in any administrative decisions that affect them and all decisions should be in their best interests.
“It’s the same argument as when you are prohibiting children from going to school or daycare,” Prof Gerber says, referring to a similar hard-line vaccination policy from the Victorian government that came into effect on New Year’s Day.
“You are punishing and discriminating against the child.”
Prof Gerber says the debate is so divisive that an article she wrote on Victoria’s school ban was rejected by four mainstream media outlets before being picked up by webzine Crikey.
“Funnily enough, another news service that picked it up and called me was Al Jazeera in Qatar, which was because when the policy was introduced, we were the only country in the world to have adopted this type of measure”.
Prof Gerber says national children’s commissioner Megan Mitchell should be helping to “get the message out” about the breach, but when the Herald contacted the Human Rights Commission, no-one was biting: “The children’s commissioner is not commenting on this,” was the response from her media minder. When the Herald pushed for a reason why, we couldn’t get an on-the-record response.
Prof Gerber fears the commission is wary of attracting controversy after a run-in between president Gillian Triggs and former prime minister Tony Abbott who described her report into children in detention as “a stitch-up”.
Federal community services minister Christian Porter oversees the vaccination program and was contacted for comment.
by STEVE GRANT
Yes but it’s ok to expose the majority of the children who aren’t old enough to be immunised and need the herd immunity to protect them from such diseases again its why diseases like polio don’t exist anymore.
Typical lefty BS protect the rights of one while risking the health of the masses
problem is Max the only science that is in support of vaccines is the science produced by the industry producing the product. no medically educated person would comment the way you did unless they were being paid to do it =)
They are all scared to lose there jobs. Money rules the world. That’s way they say “no comment” .
There is no human right to receive a targetted government benefit fro which one does not comply. The payment involved was initially a specific incentive, entitled the Maternal Vaccination Allowance. To qualify for it, families had to meet the vaccination requirements, or formally declare a conscientious objection. The new change is that the CO loophole has been removed.
So, to qualify for the financial incentive, one needs to meet the requirements – just like all other targetted benefits.
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Sue- When there is no public health law that makes vaccination compulsory, thus medical freedom and body autonomy protected under both Australian laws (Informed Consent 2.3.1 Australian Immunisation Handbook) and internationally under the Nuremberg Code, why are they being pushed coercively via social welfare and education policy as discriminatory, “targeted benefits”?
Despite the noble theory of vaccination, and the well-meaning intentions of the vaccinating public, the three main questions we need to be asking are regarding necessity, efficacy and safety of the current, massively increased since the 1990s, childhood vaccination schedule, which must be accepted in full to receive certain childcare benefits and daycare admissions under such policy proposals. A growing list of 49 or so shots, by the age of six, the many neurotoxic ingredients of which have NEVER been independently safety tested for synergistic effect. And that’s not even going into the historical record on the environmental causes of infectious disease mortality and morbidity decline, or the documented issues of inefficacy. We simply can’t keep scapegoating healthy children, just because they are partially or fully unvaccinated for a variety of reasons- often due to prior adverse reactions leading to injury, as the children of once enthusiastically vaccinating parents.
There are a number of informative documentaries circulating currently which detail these issues by interviewing highly qualified scientists and doctors as well as parents of vaccine-injured children, with reference to the medical literature. I suggest you watch The Truth About Vaccines; Vaccines Revealed, and Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, all of which comprehensively address the questions of vaccine necessity efficacy, and safety for develop world countries, as well as some of the conflicts-of-interest influencing the current and questionable but highly lucrative push to vaccinate.
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