DAVID COLEMAN MP: Well it’s great to have the Prime Minister here today to discuss the No Jab No Pay, No Play policy. This is of great importance to families in my electorate. There is a very, very strong level of support for this policy to protect our kids. So terrific to have the Prime Minister here in the electorate this afternoon.
PRIME MINISTER: Thanks David and it’s been great to meet so many families, so many mums and dads and kids of all ages. They all agree how important vaccination is.
Parents who chose not to vaccinate their child are not only putting their own child’s health at risk, but the health of every other person’s children at risk too.
So that’s why our policy is very strong and very clear. No Jab, No Pay, no childcare benefit or supplements. But we need to go further.
So we’re calling on the states and territories to support a concerted national policy so that children who are not vaccinated cannot attend preschool or childcare centres. It’s our policy, our national policy, to be ‘No Jab, No Pay, No Play’. Without a medical exemption, any child that is not vaccinated should not be able to attend preschool or childcare centres. That’s for everybody’s benefit.
All of those kids we’ve just been talking with in the playground, they’ve all be vaccinated. One of the mums had the App that showed how she’s been keeping her little daughter’s vaccinations up to date. They’re all committed, and you know, all of their hard work can be undone by other parents who do not have their children vaccinated.
The national rate is about 93 per cent. It should be as close to 100 per cent as possible. We need to drive it over the 95 per cent mark. Since January 2016 when the ‘No Jab, No Pay’ policy became law, the federal policy, we’ve seen that another 200,000 kids have been vaccinated. We believe we can take it further than that. This has got to be a concerted national effort by all governments to ensure that all of our children are vaccinated. No Jab, No Pay, No Play. The Result of that is a healthier, safer Australia.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister what if the states say no?
PRIME MINISTER: I’m confident they will say yes. I think the level of public support for vaccination is so strong, I’m confident we’ll get a concerted national response.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, is this announcement in response to Pauline Hanson’s controversial comments?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I’ve been very clear about our policy. And I always welcome every opportunity to talk about it. One of our biggest assets in the campaign for universal vaccination is awareness. So thank you all for being here and ensuring that your viewers will see this message and understand how important vaccination is.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, you had a meeting with Toni McAffrey on Friday? She obviously lost her child, talk to us about what kind of impression that had on you.
PRIME MINISTER: Yes, Toni is a very brave mum. She had a little baby girl, Dana, who basically as a newborn, she took with her to childcare when she was dropping off one of her other children, an older child. Unbeknownst to her, there were a number of cases of whooping cough in that childcare centre. That little girl got whooping cough and she died. Toni’s story is absolutely heartrending. It is every parent’s nightmare.
The truth is that if all the kids in that childcare centre had been vaccinated, their little girl would still be with us. So this is not a theoretical exercise we’re talking about. This is life and death. We protect all Australian children by ensuring that kids are vaccinated.,
So that’s why I say, if a parent says: “I’m not going to vaccinate my child”, they’re not simply putting their child at risk, they’re putting everybody else’s’ child at risk too. So that’s why another part of the announcement today and the cooperation we’re seeking from the states, is parents need to know what the vaccination rate is at a preschool or a childcare centre. If there are children there that have not been vaccinated – and there shouldn’t be – but if there are, parents need to know that. You see if Toni had known that there were a number of children at that childcare centre who had not been vaccinated and had whooping cough, of course she wouldn’t have taken either child anywhere near it.
So knowledge is very important but above all, we’ve got to make sure that we care for all of our children. The way we do that is we make sure that every child is vaccinated. So ‘No Jab, No Pay, No Play’. If you decide not to vaccinate your child, you’re putting your child’s health at risk, and you’re putting the health of everybody else’s’ children at risk too.
JOURNALIST: New South Wales is already pretty strict on this. Victoria a bit less so. Do you want everybody to have a NSW model or?
PRIME MINISTER: The states have similar but different approaches. But above all, enforcement is not as rigorous as it should be. So this is an opportunity now to bring this to COAG. We’ve got all the Premier’s and Chief Ministers around the table. We can focus on this as a national objective and make sure that we’re coordinating. No Jab, No Pay, No Play.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, do you regret the decision to release a video of you drinking beer yesterday when obviously your colleagues in WA were facing a historic defeat?
PRIME MINISTER: No I don’t. Let me talk about WA first. I want to thank Colin Barnett for eight and a half years of very strong leadership as Premier of Western Australia. Colin has had a very long career in public life and as Premier he took the reins when Western Australia was going through the global financial crisis. He’s led the state through a once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-century mining boom and of course, as it inevitably wound back, he’s led the state through that transition. He’s made a remarkable contribution to Western Australia and indeed to the nation. He’s played a great innings, magnificently. Western Australians and Australians owe him a debt of gratitude for the work he’s done.
JOURNALIST: Did he make a mistake preferencing One Nation ahead of the Nationals?
PRIME MINISTER: I can’t run the commentary on the election, I think Colin summed it up very well when he said overwhelmingly it was the ‘it’s time’ factor. It’s a government that as he said, had been in for eight and a half years. The history is that it’s very hard to win reelection after that length of time. So that was overwhelmingly the factor. Again I just want to thank Colin for his service.
JOURNALIST: Bill Shorten says the result should force you to reconsider your stance on penalty rates and any future deals with One Nation. What do you say about that?
PRIME MINISTER: The election was overwhelmingly a consequence of state issues. Everyone acknowledges that. It was a West Australian state election; it was fought on state issues. It was decided on state issues and the result was pretty much as had been expected for quite some time.
JOURNALIST: Are you concerned with state Liberal Governments continuing to fall, there will soon be none left?
PRIME MINISTER: We’ve seen, over the years, situations where state and federal voting goes in quite opposite directions. Where a state government will lose and then shortly thereafter there’ll be a strong vote for the Coalition, and indeed vice versa. Australians are very experienced at voting in elections, we do after all have quite a lot of them. They understand the difference between state and federal politics.
JOURNALIST: Should you have intervened to stop the preference deal, given its apparent disastrous outcome? Will you rule out any further One Nation preference deals?
PRIME MINISTER: Well preferences are a matter for the relevant division of the party. So that was a matter for the West Australian division of the Party and again, they’re always entered into with the intention and objective of maximising the vote and the parliamentary representation of the Liberal Party.
JOURNALIST: Do you rule it out at a federal level?
PRIME MINISTER: The next federal election is more than two years away. All preference decision will be considered by the Party organisation closer to an election.
JOURNALIST: John Howard once ruled out preference deals with One Nation. You won’t do the same?
PRIME MINISTER: Again I’d say to you that preferences are determined by the Party organisation closer to the election. I’m very happy to focus on the issues, of course, vaccination is one that became prominent in the course of the last week. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the issues but I’ll leave the political commentary to all of you. After all it’s your jobs.
JOURNALIST: Do you concede there were any federal factors at all that played into the result yesterday?
PRIME MINISTER: To be honest with you, there’s no evidence of federal factors playing a role. It was very much fought on state issues. When I’ve been in Western Australia during the campaign and in the lead-up to it, because of course the campaign has been going on in an informal sense for some time before it officially started, it was very much focused on state issues.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, turning abroad, the United Nations says the world is facing its worst humanitarian crisis since World War 2. Twenty million people across Africa and the Middle East are facing starvation. They’re calling for [inaudible]. What will Australia’s response be?
PRIME MINISTER: Well we make a very substantial contribution to humanitarian aid right around the world. We have made recent increases in our commitment in the Middle East, in particular, with respect to refugees leaving the Syrian conflict zone. Of course, as you know, we’ve taken 12,000 additional refugees from the Syrian conflict zone. We also have one of the highest per capita intakes of refugees through our humanitarian program. So Australia is absolutely pulling its weight and more in terms of our response to these humanitarian crises.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, Tony Abbott copped a lot of flak when Campbell Newman lost very badly in Queensland. Do you expect any personal, you know, blowback on yourself as a result of this?
PRIME MINISTER: The West Australian election was decided, as everyone acknowledges, on West Australian issues. As I’ve said, we owe Colin Barnett a great debt of thanks for the extraordinary service he’s provided. He’s been, sitting around the COAG table, the most experienced head of government. So we’ll all miss him and I think his achievement is in leading that state through very tumultuous times – you know, you think about it - he started off with the state in the grip of the global financial crisis. You had this extraordinary mining boom, utterly without precedent in anyone’s living memory. Then of course it tailed off, and he’s managed a very effective transition, so the state did not have as hard a landing as many predicted. So Colin has led Western Australia well. As he said, he’s led it for a long time, and as he said, time does catch up with you.
JOURNALIST: What are the Betoota guys like?
PRIME MINISTER: Oh, they’re very good company. Good company. I think it was good to catch up with them. I’ve been in vicinity of Betoota frequently, into Birdsville and out there in the outer [inaudible] where the churches are few and the men of religion are scanty, in the words of the old poem.
So it was good to catch up with them and a good example of how people are using social media and the internet to reach very, very large audiences.
Okay, thank you all very much.