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Mandatory vaccination is a human rights violation. A gross violation

By Graham Young - posted Monday, 4 October 2021


Many more will be voting for them than joining their organisations, and many of these will be people who have lost faith in the Liberal and National Parties.

If state and federal Liberal and National leaders want a chance to have, or to hold, power, they will have to temporise with these groups. They may think these voters have nowhere to go but to preference the Coalition, but they should think again.

Voters will vote strategically, and they will vote against those who take them for granted, even if they might think the alternative party would be no better. When Wayne Goss won the Queensland election in 1989 he specifically courted Liberal and National voters to give him "just one term" to clean out the corruption. It worked, although it ended up being two terms.

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Likewise in 1972, even without such a direct pitch, Gough Whitlam garnered a sizable slice of one-time Liberal voters who'd had it with the McMahon-led coalition.

Will objectors tamely register a protest by voting UAP, LDP or some other minor, and then direct their votes back to their tormentor, or will they complete the protest by flowing their preferences to the other side. With results between the majors now evenly poised, and always dependent on preferences, it's a critical question.

So if I were a state premier thinking of vaccine mandates, I'd think again, just on purely pragmatic terms. This is not a measure that is likely to survive in the courts, and even if it does, it will get smashed in the court of public opinion, both by being honoured in the breach and punished at the ballot box.

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This article was first published in The Spectator.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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