Page 911 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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through herd immunity. These people are currently exempt from the commonwealth’s no jab no play policy, and I imagine similar exemptions would exist under the principles referred to in Mrs Kikkert’s motion.
There is also a small group of people who consider themselves to be conscientious objectors, who do not believe the science behind vaccinations. When numbers were last recorded, these children made up 0.94 per cent per cent of all children in the ACT. This represented 371 children. These people make up the minority of those who have not vaccinated their children and are unlikely to be influenced by any campaigns. What is most important is that the misinformation distributed by anti-vaccination groups is corrected so that other parents are able to make informed decisions.
Equally, this cohort were not, and are unlikely ever to be, persuaded to engage by these effectively punitive measures. This is evidenced by the latest reported data on the percentage of Australian children fully immunised by 60 months of age, which shows a very small 0.1 per cent increase since the previous report, to a total of 93.2 per cent. This time period incorporated the full implementation of the no jab no play policy. Some of those parents may have found less expensive child care—for example, family day care centres—or made other financial decisions that allowed them to keep their children in care, as required, due to working commitments. Others, from higher SES backgrounds, may simply have absorbed these costs.
There is also a group of people who might be called hesitators. They are not strongly opposed to vaccination per se, but they have heard that there might be some risks and thus are unsure about those risks. These are people who have read things on the internet and the like. The Australian child health poll survey found that, while around 95 per cent of Australian children are fully vaccinated, one in three parents held concerns about vaccinations. The most recent data indicates that there are approximately 2,000 children in the ACT whose parents may be these so-called hesitators. Many of these people are at risk of not immunising their children, but can be effectively targeted with education and health promotion campaigns.
The science behind immunisation is proven, sound and beyond doubt. As a government, in conjunction with health professionals, we should be able to explain these benefits to the vast majority of Canberrans to ensure our immunisation rates continue to increase. My concern with the no jab no play principles is that they risk ostracising a group of people and pushing them from being hesitators towards being full-blown sceptics. The policy’s aim is well intended, but I believe that it punishes some people for a lack of understanding or for disadvantaged life or financial circumstances that make it difficult to access immunisations.
It is the Greens’ belief that introducing the no jab no play policy could result in entrenched disadvantage, social isolation and reduced engagement with a range of positive social and medical interventions for the very small numbers of unimmunised children in our community, with negative impacts far beyond any immediate effects. Other approaches, such as education and community-wide campaigns, would be equally effective and not risk excluding children and families from accessing important early childhood education services.
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