A union that represents about 9000 Queensland nurses has launched a fighting fund to challenge the state’s mandatory jabs policy.
Thursday marks the first deadline for Queensland Health staff who care for patients to have had one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And they must be fully vaccinated by October 31.
The dominant and long-established Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union, which has about 62,000 members, is actively encouraging its members to get vaccinated.
But its much smaller rival, the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland says the mandatory jabs policy could drive away frontline workers and cripple the health system.
It has launched a public fundraising campaign to bankroll “key legal fights” in support of nurses it says should not have to choose between a jab and a job.
“We are opposed to the mandate for the COVID-19 vaccinations,” NPAQ secretary Aenghas Hopkinson-Pearson says on the union’s GoFundMe page.
He says nurses “are far more capable than politicians, bureaucrats, and so-called public health officials of making informed medical decisions relating to their own bodies and how they will protect their patients”.
The NPAQ is among a number of new unions set up by an entity called the Red Union Support Hub to challenge those that have traditionally represented workers.
The Red Union hub’s director, Jack McGuire, was on Monday interviewed on social media by retiring federal Liberal National Party federal MP George Christensen, who has claimed masks and lockdowns don’t stop the spread of COVID-19.
The interview was part of an event Mr Christensen promised would offer advice for people who’d suffered “no jab, no job abuse” by their employers.
Mr McGuire said the hub recently launched the NPAQ to deal with an influx of interest from disgruntled nurses in NSW and Victoria.
It’s also just formed the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society, as an alternative to the Australian Medical Association.
Mr McGuire said a group of doctors approached the hub, seeking to set up the industrial association, “because the AMA is on record now as saying they want the jab mandated for every person in the country”.
“There are some doctors who totally disagree with that in Australia … they want to see a return to the primacy of that doctor-patient relationship and to remove government from that,” he told Mr Christensen.
The AMA has never said it wants mandatory vaccinations for all Australians but does support that for healthcare and allied workers.
On Wednesday, Mr McGuire told AAP a new police union in Queensland might also be on the cards in part because some officers are upset by the police commissioner’s directive that they must be vaccinated.
On the issue of mandatory jabs for Queensland nurses, Mr McGuire said hospitals could be left without enough nurses to run them.
“What’s going to prompt worse patient outcomes, a quarter or 11 per cent of workers turning up un-jabbed, or actually having people in the hospitals to keep them running,” he told AAP.
Queensland Health says more than 91 per cent of almost 115,000 workers at the state’s hospital and health services have already had one dose of a vaccine. More than 83 per cent are fully vaccinated.
The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union told AAP there was no collapse of the aged care system on September 16, when those workers were required to have had their first jab.
“Some were predicting the sky would fall in in aged care, it didn’t,” secretary Beth Mohle told AAP.
“I think we just have to not pre-empt anything and just work through any issues.”
The QNMU has “strongly encouraged” all nurses, midwives and nursing assistants to get vaccinated and meet “evidence-based workplace immunisation requirements”.
It recognises people have a right to make personal choices about immunisation, but notes that exercising that choice may have “professional and industrial consequences”.
AAP
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