In a shocking move, the Andrews Government announced a new bill on February 19 2020 to introduce mandatory vaccination for all frontline health workers and other workers in the health system.
“Our new laws will mean healthcare workers must be fully immunized to protect themselves and patients against the flu each year, as well as whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and hepatitis B.”
By the looks of the bill, any other vaccines, such as Hepatitis A and TB, could be added to this list. And the bill would apply to ancillary staff such as cleaners in hospitals and aged-care facilities.
Read the press release here:
Making Vaccination Mandatory For Healthcare Workers
https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/making-vaccination-mandatory-for-healthcare-workers/
Action needed
Many health workers affected do not know about this bill, or don’t know what they can do about it – please print off the following letter and hand out to health workers wherever you can, such as in hospitals and medical centres and their carparks. If you would like to alter it for some reason you can copy and paste the text into your text editor and edit away.
Download letter (PDF)
We need as many people as possible to email all Victorian MPs, both lower house (Legislative Assembly) and upper house (Legislative Council), and to arrange meetings with your own representatives, to express your concerns. Find a list of Victorian MPs below (we suggest you set the page to see 100 entries):
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/people-in-parliament/members-search/list-all-members
To find your electorate enter your suburb and postcode into the following page – District means lower house and Region means upper house. You can also use an interactive map from this page.
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/electorates
Once you know your District and Region you can look up your MPs – you can use google for this.
Find an example email on the following page on this website:
Health Workers Law Emails
Please do change it to make it your own, politicians tend to ignore template emails. For talking points, see the example email and you will find ideas and links to studies on the following page on the AVN website:
https://avn.org.au/information/list-mps-senators-lobbying/
The Legislation
The bill consists of amendments to established Acts, and is described as:
A Bill for an Act to amend the Health Services Act 1988 and the Ambulance Services Act 1986 to provide for directions relating to the vaccination of persons employed or engaged by certain hospitals, health service establishments and ambulance services and for other purposes.
View all information about the bill on the Victorian Government website here:
Health Services Amendment (Mandatory Vaccination of Healthcare Workers) Bill 2020
Two PDFs are available for download, both are fairly short – you can download them from the above page or from this website, below:
