Port Hedland council votes to sue WA Government over vaccine mandates

A local council in regional Western Australia has voted in favour of launching a Supreme Court action challenging the state’s ongoing vaccination mandates.

WA chief health officer Dr Andy Robertson. Picture: Colin Murty/The Australian

A local council in regional Western Australia has voted in favour of launching a Supreme Court action challenging the state’s ongoing vaccination mandates.

The Port Hedland council, which oversees the town that is home to the world‘s largest iron ore export facility, passed a series of proposals last week put forward by the community with the aim of overturning the rules that require about 75 per cent of WA workers to be vaccinated if they want to keep their jobs.

Legal advice obtained by the council ahead of last week’s council meeting warned councillors that the case would be “extremely expensive”, would have a limited likelihood of success, and would go beyond the council’s powers and functions. The advice also warned that there would be “significant legal and reputational damage” to the council if it pursued the proposed resolutions.

But three of the four resolutions – including one calling for the council to apply to the Supreme Court for a judicial review of WA’s vaccination mandates and its ongoing state of emergency declaration – were supported by a majority of councillors.

The only resolution that failed was a motion that would have required the council to set aside $500,000 to fund the legal proceedings.

A spokeswoman for the Town of Port Hedland said the council’s chief executive had approached WA’s Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries in the wake of the vote on how to resource the legal actions.

“Given the 2021-22 town budget does not have an allocation for such action, council must approve any additional expenditure through an additional resolution,” the spokeswoman said.

“As this did not occur at the special council meeting on Wednesday night, an agenda item will be brought to an upcoming council meeting to deal with this matter. This will allow council time to consider advice and recommendations on appropriate levels of funding to resource such actions to meet the intent of the resolutions.”

Port Hedland‘s controversial mayor Peter Carter – who has tried to do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of deals without any funding behind him, and who recently stepped down from a school board after he was seen being fed strawberries by a woman in a hotel room in Vietnam during a video meeting – voted against all four motions.

WA introduced Australia’s broadest Covid vaccination mandates, covering industries including mining, retail, hospitality and construction, last year in an attempt to drive up vaccination rates that had lagged behind the rest of the nation.

With WA now having the highest third-dose vaccination rate (80.7 per cent) of any state, there have been growing calls for a revision of those mandates amid concerns that those who have lost their jobs after refusing to be vaccinated could form a new social underclass.

Most other Covid restrictions have been listed, although WA Premier Mark McGowan has so far held fast on the vaccination mandates.

WA’s chief health officer Dr Andy Robertson said on Friday that the rules would be reviewed in coming weeks.

WA is in the middle of a major Covid outbreak, with the state recording 12,399 new cases on Sunday.

Despite representing only 1 per cent of the population, the fully unvaccinated represent about 32 per cent of Covid-related hospitalisations in the state.