Coronavirus: Business flags talks on making vaccines a must

Companies and university residential colleges explore how to make the jab compulsory for adults.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott says anyone flying in or out of the country needed to be immunised. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Big business is demanding a ­“targeted conversation” about mandatory vaccination as companies and university residential colleges explore how to make Covid-19 jabs compulsory for adults.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said anyone flying in or out of the country needed to be immunised and it had reached the point “where we have to take a commonsense approach” on vaccine requirements.

Queensland says interstate truck drivers should be forced to get the Covid shot, widening a call by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for the mandated vaccination of fly-in, fly-out mine workers and airline flight crew.

Qantas is driving the push by business, with the airline announcing this week that all aviation workers should be required to have the vaccine. The widening emergency in Sydney, where 170 new cases were reported on Friday, has forced the cancellation of elective surgery across the city’s public hospitals.

Ms Westacott said: “Where we have international facing workers, we run the risk of compromising the integrity of our quarantine and containment systems which means we run the risk of being a stop-start economy for another 12 months. The only way we are going to get domestic borders to remain open is to have people, who are on planes, vaccinated.

“At the very least, we have to have a targeted conversation about making the vaccine worth something.”

Australian business leaders are carefully tracking international developments after President Joe Biden moved to compel hundreds of thousands federal government employees in the US to either get the vaccine or be regularly tested.

Dozens of American universities including Harvard and Princeton, have said they will ban unvaccinated students when the 2021-22 academic year starts next month.

Australia’s oldest university residential college, St Paul’s at the University of Sydney, revealed on Friday it was “open to the possibility” of requiring boarders to have the vaccine.

The 165-year-old Anglican college is one of a number set to compel students to be tested for Covid-19 before the commencement of semester two on August 9.

But Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson, speaking for the nation’s top universities, said mandating the vaccine was not on their agenda.

“While strongly endorsing the vaccination rollout, Go8 universities are not adopting nor discussing a mandatory vaccination policy,” she said.

“We are currently offering our resources to federal and state governments to expedite the vaccination of Australia’s population.”

ACTU president Michele O’Neil warned that unions would not accept vaccine mandates imposed by employers as a work condition.

“The issue with vaccine uptake isn’t worker hesitancy, it’s accessibility,” she said. “Many workers cannot afford to take an unpaid day off work to get the vaccine – all workers, including casuals, need paid vaccine leave so they can go and get the vaccine and, if needed, recover from the side ­effects.

“Decisions about mandating vaccines must be made by health officials, not employers.”

The federal government has recommended that aged-care workers be ordered to have the vaccine, though Scott Morrison cautioned the states had been slow to comply.

However, the Prime Minister on Thursday maintained his position that vaccination should be voluntary for the general population. “You can’t make compulsory things that aren’t able to be made compulsory under our law … so any decisions that companies make have to be consistent with our laws and particularly our ­employment laws,” he said.

Qantas acknowledged on Wednesday that requiring all aviation workers to have the vaccine was challenging but necessary to protect an essential service.

“We’ve seen that just one Covid-positive employee can inadvertently shut down a freight facility or passenger terminal, which can have a big impact on the broader community and the economy,” the airline said.