Passport to the future: Calls for national vaccine documentation
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s suggestion that Australia needs to become tougher on vaccination by introducing a national vaccine passport just makes sense, writes Charles Wooley.
Tasmania
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FOR most of my travelling life I carried a small yellow booklet which recorded all the nasty diseases against which I had been vaccinated. To enter many countries in the ’80s and ’90s it was a compulsory document, just as it was to get back into Australia from anywhere in India, Africa or South America.
I had arms like pin cushions. Hepatitis A and B, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and rabies were just a few among many others I have now forgotten.
But it all came back at the beginning of this week when former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull argued that Australia needs to become tougher on vaccination by introducing a national vaccine passport.
While we cannot force people to get the jab we should, he said: “Make it very clear that there are some things you will not be able to do if you are not yet vaccinated.”
Some fear compulsion by stealth.
It is not compulsory to get the jab but if, for instance, you want to work in health or aged care then it will be.
But really, what reasonable person can argue with that?
In office, Malcolm did not always talk such unmitigated common sense; his ideas about getting water to run uphill (aka pumped hydro) and his $89bn-a-dozen submarine scheme did not excite universal approval.
In advocating for vaccine passports Turnbull correctly assumes not everyone will agree.
“I know people will say this is tough; this is non-libertarian … but if you want to work in aged care, if you want to get on an aeroplane, if you want to go to the cinema; we are entitled to say, ‘Well if you haven’t been vaccinated, then you can’t do it,’ just to protect the rest of the community,” he said.
We are all uneasy about handing extra powers to government when we are already so deeply bogged down in rules and regulations.
The federal parliament passes about 90 new laws every year.
The new law I will enthusiastically support would be the one that enforces dropping an old Act of Parliament every time a new Bill is passed.
Otherwise, in time we will be strangled in statutes.
At present how many laws are cancelled every year?
Silly question, as almost half of our federal politicians are lawyers. Still, they can’t always get it wrong, can they, otherwise why would we have a federal parliament?
In assessing the social good in prospective legislation sometimes you need to do little more than consider who is against it.
The acid test is, where do parliamentary crackpots like Craig Kelly MP and George Christensen MP stand on the issue?
Kelly has announced he will be introducing a Bill into parliament to stop the legislation of vaccine passports.
Equally quick off the rank, Christensen is launching an online petition to the same end.
“I will be railing against any attempt [to] segregate Australians into haves and have-nots and denies them jobs, denies them services, or denies them access to certain areas,” he says on his website.
But hold on a minute. Even my good mate Dusty the dog has a vaccine passport. A little blue book recording his inoculation status. Without it he cannot travel abroad nor fly interstate, nor can he stay locally in any dog hotel.
George and his mate Craig have pushed me into the Turnbull camp on this issue.
“We are not safe until we are all safe,” Turnbull said this week, possibly pointing out the bleeding obvious.
Which was not so obvious to the National Party’s Matt Canavan. He thought the implementation of a vaccine passport would be ‘un-Australian’.
But then so is the Covid-19 ‘un-Australian’.
I think it came from China.
I’m almost certain it didn’t escape from the Oodnadatta Institute of Virology.
WELL DONE ON THE QUICK FIX ON WIELANGTA, FERGO!
I thought I might need a passport to get to Orford after all the alarm about the condition of the only back road to Sandy Bay’s favourite, now marooned, holiday retreat.
But making the trip this week on the Wielangta Rd, I feel compelled to write the most unusual conjunction of words in Tasmanian reporting: Well done Michael Ferguson!
Of course, ministers are mere titular heads of departments. The real work, or lack of it, is carried out by permanent public servants who remain ensconced long after the hapless and often clueless politician has been flicked.
‘Fergo’ got the blame for the Royal Hobart Hospital fiasco and the initial slow progress at the airport roundabout. But it is quite likely he had no significant decision-making role in any of it. ‘Ministerial responsibility’ really means being responsible for other people’s stuff-ups. So why shouldn’t the minister get some praise for fixing up a few kilometres of bush road?
Even if he didn’t hold the shovel.
Wielangta is an Aboriginal name meaning ‘tall trees’.
Most of those mighty swamp gums are now gone, logged for more than a century and destroyed in devastating bushfires in the 1920s.
But there is a rich and lush temperate rainforest growing back and it is well worth seeing with the kids. There are even some preserved remnant corners to give you an idea of what the whole 37,500ha Wielangta Forest was once like.
And what it might be like again, given a few hundred years.
The road was formerly a great 4WD track and an enjoyably rough way to get to the East Coast.
Now it has been transformed into one of the best dirt bush roads in Tasmania.
The adequate and expeditious job done on the Wielangta should be great news for the traders and permanent residents of Orford who were otherwise faced with a three-hour trip to town via the Midland Highway.
I cannot remember many times when a Tasmanian government moved so quickly.
Is there something I should know?
On Monday morning this week the traffic was light.
I didn’t really need to put the Toyota into four-wheel-drive at any time during the brief 30km trip, even though, in the wet, some stretches were muddy and a little slippery.
So long as they are not in too much of a hurry the ‘Sandy Bay shackies’ (as they have long been known in Orford) driving their Beamers and Mercs should make the journey to those beachfront hideaways safely and perhaps even gratefully.
Pity for Fergo they are not in his electorate.
TOXIC: Disagreement over salmon expose not set to become a running debate
FORMER state Labor politician, Julian Amos has taken a PR job representing the salmon industry in Tasmania. In the turbulent wake of Richard Flanagan’s bombshell publication Toxic, it might be cold and lonely work.
I trust Julian is being well remunerated.
Last week in this column I wondered why the industry had not sued the author Flanagan and Penguin, his publisher.
If you missed reading it, I am deeply wounded, but you can still read it below.
Flanagan’s assertions whether true or not are horrendously damaging to the salmon industry.
I still ask: if they are not true why don’t they sue?
I will leave you to read the book and make up your own mind.
Do not be swayed by opinion columnists, like Wooley, nor by PR men, like Amos.
“Jules” (I’ve known him forever) registered “surprise” in a letter to the Mercury this week that, “Wooley has not taken up an invitation to visit one of the farms to see for himself what is occurring”.
Well, if he reads the book, he will see Flanagan’s assertions are about secrecy and cover-ups, compliant regulators, food additives and chemicals. All of them things not easily seen.
So, I doubt being given a PR tour will reveal much. Still if there is a visit in the offing, I would be happy to go, if only to meet the owners and the workers.
I hope I can find my way there, as Julian in his letter has accused my writing of being “myopic”.
In fact, I see well into the distance.
And back into the past too.
I remember a great old Tasmanian journo Johnny Martin, who ran the ABC Hobart newsroom when I was a beginner. I have never forgotten his piece of advice which in turn, I often pass on to the new kids.
“There are only two questions in journalism,” he said.
“The first is: what have they got to say. The second is: who is paying them to say it?”
For the record, the editor of the Mercury has never told me what to write about, nor what to say.
Fear not readers. Amos versus Wooley will not become a running debate in these pages. Unlike the debate between Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson which sold many copies of the Bulletin back in 1892, this one might be a Loaded Dog for circulation, so let’s just move on.
A SQUEEZE OF LEMON WITH YOUR SMOKED SALMON?
Or perhaps you would rather you have it on your tasty molluscs from Blue Lagoon Oysters down Dunalley way.
At this time of year, they are waxing fat again and are delicious. They grow in the clearest and cleanest water and, I reckon, beat the legendary Sydney rock oysters. My visiting Sydney mates generally agree.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney called oysters “the frond-lipped, brine stung, glut of privilege.”
Fortunately, you don’t need to be rich to get the best Tasmanian oysters, though we are indeed privileged to have a clean environment (mostly) in which to grow them.
Long may it stay that way.
I discovered the delights of Blue Lagoon Oysters after I moved down to Carlton Beach, east of Dodge City.
If you like your oysters freshly opened, unwashed, chilled and salty you will be in heaven.
The only thing better than a dozen natural Blue Lagoon oysters is another dozen and another after that.
They do need a lemon, quartered and squeezed over them but sadly I had an unhappy history of trying to grow lemons in Tasmania; until now.
My beach shack is atop 20m, with no soil and only tank water. The back windows look south across the surf and the clear blue waters of Frederick Henry Bay as far as the fading lavender outline of Bruny Island.
Over the horizon there are still some 4400km to the ice. Despite the distance the southerly winds can be bitterly cold.
The front of the house faces north and has all day sun. It is sheltered from the wind and always warm. It is another world and from the first day it felt like Lemon Country.
I consulted my local nursery in Sorell and bought the Eureka variety of lemon which, inside of two years, has grown more than 2m tall and is covered in glossy dark green leaves and large, yellow, juicy lemons.
“What is the secret of your success?” I hear you clamour.
Well, I remembered how the guru of gardening, our own wonderful Peter Cundall, once said the most common query he got in Tasmania was about growing lemons.
I researched the Cundall-lemon connection and found an illuminating story he wrote in the Weekly Times back in February 2018.
Peter described an ailing lemon tree in his neighbourhood: “Most of its leaves were yellow …. grey shards of dead wood poked through a sparse canopy, and down below, the ground was littered with fallen leaves.”
Sound familiar?
Then something amazing happened. Passing by one spring day he observed signs of revival. A few leaves were turning green. And then over the next few weeks dark shoots of new growth were appearing on the bare branches.
By summer Peter observed the tree had become “magically transformed”.
The rich green leaves, creamy white flowers and clusters of tiny swelling lemons demanded investigation.
Peter soon found the elderly owners of the lemon tree had recently joined a local cricket club and held barbecues at their home for the players, whenever they won.
The lady of the house explained how the garden miracle came to pass: “Everyone was in high spirits … and to be honest, drank enormous amounts of beer.
“The constant stream of great boozy blokes lurching through our house, looking for the loo, was a bit too much.”
The solution was to erect a tall, temporary hessian screen in the corner of the garden where the now flourishing lemon had been slowly dying.
Peter was told, “We even stuck a ‘used beer’ sign on the screen with instructions to spread it about a bit.”
Reading this was my Eureka moment.
My lemon is strategically placed below the veranda and does enjoy a few beers. In moderation of course.
Whenever I eat oysters on the deck, I acknowledge my debt to Peter Cundall for the success of my lemon tree.
In the words of the great man, it can only be described as “bloomin’ marvellous”.
Has Richard Flanagan inserted a needle in a fillet of Tasmanian salmon? Charles Wooley dissects ‘Toxic’
Remember back in September 2018 it took just 100 punnets of strawberries contaminated with needles to create a food scandal resulting in major food retailers such as Coles and Woolworths removing Queensland and Western Australian strawberries from their shelves.
Nationwide, consumers were scared off the product and the strawberry-needle-crisis went on to cost the Queensland growers a staggering $12m.
Tasmanian prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan has written a nonfiction book ‘Toxic’ which warns that Tasmanian farmed salmon contains at least one chemical substance which might well be more dangerous than a metal needle.
Flanagan claims that a known carcinogen ‘ethoxyquin’ is used as a feed additive in the production of salmon.
I’m not comprehensively reviewing the book here except to say that I found it frightening beyond the unsettling and widespread environmental damage which Tasmanians have reluctantly accepted as the cost of hosting a billion-dollar salmon industry.
As a former resident of Tasmania’s beautiful D’Entrecasteaux Channel, in the early 90s, I saw first-hand the same degradation of water quality and disappearance of native fish and birdlife reported by Flanagan from his writer’s retreat on Bruny Island.
“I felt sick and cold and lost, as if something fundamental had been stolen from me and my home defiled by thieves as I lay sleeping,” writes Flanagan.
I too saw it as it happened, but I had never heard of ‘ethoxyquin’ and it never occurred to me that the apparent compensations of cheap Tasmanian smoked salmon which I loved, and the fish farm escapees I caught and eagerly devoured, could make me sick and might even damage my unborn children.
Tasmanians should read Toxic to make up their own minds. They might even want to crosscheck the sources, well elaborated in the book, as I have been doing. Flanagan’s latest work, the metaphorical needle in the salmon fillet, is even more unsettling than his fiction and sadly the reaction of the salmon industry so far is a long way short of reassuring.
Over the past few weeks, the industry has purchased full-page advertisements in this newspaper denying the book’s claims.
The defence has hardly been as forensic as Flanagan’s attack. Perhaps ‘Big Salmon’ is working on a scientifically credible rebuttal but mostly I have seen only superficially eye-catching graphic layouts, saying little more than “Not True”.
The industry case appears to be in the hands of the PR people. A more solid response might be required: possibly a thoroughgoing scientific rebuttal based on evidence from world experts at arm’s length from the industry. If that is possible.
It is simply not enough to assuage public concern by recycling a tired old PR line from the Tasmanian Forest Wars describing Flanagan as “a successful writer of fiction.”
That line wasn’t even original the first time round.
Rather than hiring local PR guys, you might wonder why the salmon industry has not instead engaged a top mainland litigation firm?
It’s a fair question.
Why don’t they take legal action?
Why aren’t they going for the throat?
Let me give you a salutary insider-view of what happens when a big story alleging industrial malpractice is published or broadcast.
Often, a writ is served on a publication or shortly afterwards. This is called ‘a stopper’ because if it is effective there can be no further comment published until after a court hearing.
Short of that, the threat of multimillion-dollar litigation can sometimes make the issue go away.
Gunns Ltd tried that, back in the darkest ages of Tasmania’s Forest Wars, even suing individual complainants, and it backfired.
But it did scare the hell out of people, for a while.
In my years at 60 Minutes, when a story made us nervous, we were obliged to get the lawyers in before it went to air.
There was always the dark shadow of presumption that: “If you call in the bloody lawyers you might as well throw the yarn in the bin.”
But sometimes only a change of word, a nuancing of language and a lot of use of the word ‘alleged’ was enough to get the go-ahead.
A good defamation lawyer was always well worth his long and expensive lunch.
After the story went to air, we awaited the writ.
If in a few days that didn’t arrive, the legendary executive producer, John Westacott, would say: “Well it looks like you blokes didn’t get the full story. There must be something worse out there you have missed otherwise they would be taking us to court.”
The point always is that no matter what the bigger publishers and TV networks spend on a story they will spend more than 10 times as much defending it in court where anything they missed first time will be discovered.
Effectively there will be an even more thorough investigation of the issue which will make the story in contention look like a mere once over lightly.
Scientific experts, forensic accountants and even private detectives would be engaged to poke into every nook and cranny of the aggrieved litigator’s business and even their private lives.
You need to possess deep pockets and to be as pure as the driven snow to sue a major television network or a big outfit like Penguin, the publisher of Toxic.
My understanding is that Flanagan had to spend an intensive six weeks with a top Sydney litigation silk before the book got the all-clear for publication.
Thus it came to pass that Tasmania’s greatest living author was able sum up, in one long angry sentence, in a book now into its fifth reprint, “And so we discover that a food product marketed as capable of treating cancer, of miraculously increasing male virility and restoring women’s beauty, is in reality a compound derivative of synthetic dye, antibiotics, petrochemical derivatives the macerated remains of battery hen beaks, skulls, guts and feathers once destined for abattoir waste streams, along with fishmeal made from jeopardised fish stocks stabilised with a pesticide also used to stop car tyres cracking that happens to be a carcinogen, and soy meal that has possible links to slave labour and the deforestation of the Amazon … ”
Whew!
Reading that for the first time I remembered how my old 60 Minutes boss, Westacott would say: “Mate, that’s a tough call. We’ll run with it, but I will tell you one thing, there will be tears before bedtime.”
But whose tears?
I doubt Flanagan is the crying kind.
I have not eaten salmon since I read the book and might never again as the author is not taking back one harsh word of it.
“What salmon actually eat is, finally, what we eat when we eat Tasmanian salmon: secrets and lies,” Flanagan maintains.
It’s a pity though. I did like the smoked salmon.
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