Rebel Lib senator Alex Antic vows to fight back

Anti-vax mandate campaigner Alex Antic says he has been ‘fitted up’ by health bureaucrats after being confronted by police and placed in hotel quarantine.

Alex Antic is questioned at Adelaide Airport on Thursday. Picture Dean Martin

Liberal senator and anti-vax mandate campaigner Alex Antic says he has been “fitted up” by health bureaucrats after he was confronted by police and then placed in hotel quarantine upon landing at Adelaide Airport on Thursday night.

The man who helped lead last week’s Coalition revolt over mandatory vaccinations returned home at the end of the two-week parliamentary sitting week only to be escorted by police to a waiting van and taken to a medi-hotel.

Senator Antic said it was ­“curious” that the media knew of his return and were waiting to photograph and film his arrival, suggesting he was being made an example for speaking out against vax mandates.

Late on Friday he posted a video from inside his hotel room, saying he had told police and health officials he was happy to quarantine for 14 days at home as he normally did after parliament.

He said that despite explaining he had a wife and three-month-old daughter that he was told he had to go into supervised hotel quarantine, and could not return home.

“The bureaucratic powers that be in this state now run this state,” Senator Antic says in the video. “We have to fight back. We have to. Each of us is doing our part in our own way. They’re not really after me, they’re after all of us.”

Senator Antic has been ­accused of holding his own government to ransom after he joined four Coalition MPs last week in backing a One Nation bill outlawing vaccination mandates.

He has been the most vocal of the MPs and has not softened his position, saying he will continue withholding support for any government legislation until the federal government acts on vaccine mandates.

He told The Weekend Australian that “the only people being held to ransom are those losing their jobs for refusing to be immunised”.

Senator Antic refuses to disclose his vaccination status ­although Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last week that it was his understanding that the senator had been doubly vaxxed.

Senator Antic insists he is not an anti-vaxxer, rather an ­opponent of big government not only telling people what choices they must make, but threatening to have them sacked if they make the wrong choices.

And he is openly disdainful of the manner in which elected governments have surrendered executive power to unelected health officials.

“It is deep within the Liberal Party’s DNA to protect the freedom of citizens to choose their way of living,” Senator Antic told The Weekend Australian.

“Public health is important but freedom and choice are just as ­important. We have been told by the left to trust the science for a long time. We have been told that in relation to climate change.

“The science says that if you are vaccinated you can still get the disease. There are arguments and theories about how much that is dampened down by the vaccine. I don’t propose to speak to matters of medical science. I can see that in areas such as aged care we need to play a straight bat because these are high risk areas. We have mandated that at the commonwealth level, and I can see the logic.

“But we are talking here about mandates being put on truckies, people who work outside in an open field, people who work on their own. It’s not just governments mandating this. A lot of businesses are also taking the lead on it too. We are creating a two-tiered society.”

Senator Antic is a reviled figure within the moderate-dominated Liberal Party in his home state of South Australia. He was accused of branch stacking this year over the recruitment of several hundred conservative Christians into the branch – a claim he hotly denies, saying the Christians had every much a right to join the party as anyone.

He has repeatedly drawn the ire of Premier Steven Marshall for questioning the government’s acquiescence to the police and health bureaucracy in managing Covid.

He said he stood by those criticisms and that the treatment he had received since returning to Adelaide on Thursday only proved his point.

Senator Antic said he would continue to withhold support for all government bills until vaccine mandates were addressed by the federal government, saying that opposition to compulsion was “a key Liberal value”.

“I don’t see this as me holding anyone to ransom,” he said. “I would put it the other way – health bureaucracies across the country are doing that to people with their lives. These people have real jobs, they have mortgages, and whatever we can do at the federal level to stop that, we should do it post-haste.”

Senator Antic said he understood that the federal government did not have the constitutional authority to prevent the states from issuing vaccine mandates, and as such, needed to explore other measures such as withdrawing funds to state bureaucracies or blocking the provision of personal immunisation history by the federal government to state authorities.

“I’m old enough to remember when we were all in this together but surely being all in this together means bringing those who make choices about their own medical treatment along for the ride, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Travelling interstate, ordering a cup of coffee, going to the movies, visiting an elderly parent, and being allowed to work should never require an unwanted and unnecessary medical procedure, whether it is ‘safe and effective’ or not.

“There is a slippery slope argument here.”