Caleb Bond: Confusing jab rules adding more stress to a terrible year

In what was the world’s most locked-down city, people deserve to live without confusion and heartache — but the stress continues with complex vaccine rules for kids.

It is all good and well for health bureaucrats to dream up vaccine rules but they have to make sense in the real world.

In the state that was home to the world’s most locked-down city, people want and deserve to be able to live without further confusion and heartache.

But that is exactly what families have had to deal with.

Children were turned away from sport on the weekend because of a supremely complicated rule that, to any normal person, appeared to ban unvaccinated people – including 12 year olds – from any venues that were open to the public.

There was, however, a separate rule that provided a vaccine exemption for community sport, so long as it was done somewhere that operated specifically for community sport.

Children have been turned away from sport because of a supremely complicated Covid rule.

Kids were turned away from sport in tears because many venues quite fairly felt that, under the rules, they could not let unvaccinated kids in because they were public places.

Then the government clarified that these venues could actually allow unvaccinated children in for sport, despite them also being open to the public.

Confused yet?

Despite the fact the welcome easing of coronavirus rules came before 90 per cent of people aged 16 or over were fully vaccinated, vaccine passports have been applied to children from the age of 12.

So kids have ended up in the ludicrous position of not being able to go to their own school uniform shops, attend Scout jamborees or go to the zoo with their parents, even though not a single healthy child has died of Covid in Australia.

Thanks to another government backflip, though, those same unvaccinated kids can go to the zoo as long as it’s a school-organised activity with a teacher present.

Now Health Minister Martin Foley has left the door open to vaccine mandates being applied to children as young as five. Picture: David Geraghty

How it is more dangerous to go to the zoo with your parents than a group of rowdy classmates remains to be seen.

Children have had it tough enough, not being able to socialise and go to school, without again being excluded.

Parents were simply not given enough time to ensure children – those least susceptible to the dangers of Covid – were vaccinated before rules were put in place.

Nor were many aware that it would extend to 12-year-olds. The government and its bureaucrats have not thought beyond the press release and into the real world.

And now Health Minister Martin Foley has left the door open to these same mandates being applied to children as young as five, should a vaccination be approved for them.

As former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth has noted, there is no need for these draconian rules when those most vulnerable – the elderly and unwell – have vaccination rates well beyond 80 per cent.

Families do not deserve this stress on top of a damn ordinary year.