A Queensland Industrial Relations Commissioner has expressed his frustration at anti-vaccination challenges that continue to tie up the state’s courts and tribunals.
In a decision delivered on Friday, Commissioner Dwyer declined to hear an appeal by Queensland Health laboratory technician Vera Tilley, who in 2022 was denied an exemption from Health Employment Directive 12/21 Employee COVID-19 Vaccination Requirements.
He said Ms Tilley had already had the benefit of a hearing and written reasons delivered in her previous appeal last year against the decision to refuse her application for exemption.
He said despite having been “referred to a body of compelling authorities contradicting her arguments”, none of them appeared to have been considered by her in lodging her latest application, which required her to demonstrate she had an “arguable case” for an appeal.
Her submissions “immediately revealed that she was intending to advance a collection of familiar misconceived arguments about the directive and the vaccines”, and contained a “familiar potpourri” of grounds, including that the vaccine mandate was bribery or coercion, and that vaccines were both ineffective and unsafe, he said.
“One would expect the proper way to demonstrate why a case was arguable would be to attempt to highlight distinctions between the grounds of appeal pleaded and other appeals that had been dismissed,” Commissioner Dwyer said.
“Alternatively, an appellant might attempt to demonstrate why one or all of their grounds of appeal carry some unique public interest or precedent value.
“Instead, Ms Tilley filed submissions that could most kindly be described as poorly constructed legalese.
“The submissions as a whole border on nonsensical.”
Commissioner Dwyer said Ms Tilley had posed “questions of law” which in essence requested the Commission to provide legal advice to her.
“The grand finale to Ms Tilley’s submissions is an assertion that the Hospitals and Health Boards Act 2011 (Qld) ‘is inconsistent’ with the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), a situation which she describes as ‘repugnant’ to the Constitution pursuant to s 109 of the Constitution,” he said.
“There is so much that is wrong with this submission, it is difficult to even begin to address it.
“In summary, not only does Ms Tilley fail to make any submissions about why the appeal she filed is ‘arguable’, but she purports to open up a raft of even less meritorious, misconceived arguments.
“The submissions are so poorly constructed they do not warrant further articulation.”
Commissioner Dwyer said he was not convinced Ms Tilley’s arguments were genuinely held views.
“On the contrary, I consider they are a simple veneer that has been awkwardly applied in an effort to disguise her conventional but plainly futile grounds of appeal,” he said.
“At the very heart of this matter is the simple fact that Ms Tilley objects to the direction that she must be vaccinated in order to continue to attend her place of work. It is no more complex than that.
“Further, the reasons for Ms Tilley’s objections to vaccination are equally clear and simple: she objects on grounds of her religious beliefs and further, she does not consider that the covid vaccines are safe or efficient, and therefore not necessary.
“Because Ms Tilley so vehemently holds to these views, and because the vaccine mandate plainly generates in her an irrepressible (but misplaced) sense of injustice, she has attempted to contort her personal sense of being wronged into the form of a Constitutional challenge.
“But despite the rather grandiose concepts that she has ineptly cobbled together in her submissions, the briefest of scrutiny causes that façade to collapse, and revealed in the rubble are the same old tedious arguments about ‘civil conscription’ and ‘coercion’.”
Commissioner Dwyer said he was yet again compelled to remind Ms Tilley that Commission resources were drawn from the public purse.
“While access to justice remains an important tenet of our society, such access does not extend to unreasonable individuals who refuse to accept the futility of their arguments and instead, seek to press stubbornly on,” he said.
“Such conduct is a serious abuse of the resources of the Commission at the expense of other litigants seeking the resolution of their genuine controversies.”
Commissioner Dwyer’s decision was among several similar QIRC decisions published this month.
In another public sector appeal decision published on Friday, Commissioner McLennan declined to hear an appeal against disciplinary action imposed on school administration officer Kerry Rowe for non-compliance with the vaccination directive.
“I note that Ms Rowe has not raised any unique or novel arguments which would lead to the inference that she has an arguable case as to why the disciplinary action decision was unfair or unreasonable,” she said.
“The matters contained within the Ms Rowe’s submissions have been the subject of numerous appeals before this Commission and have relevantly been dismissed.”
Commissioner McLennan referred to her colleague’s observations that the body’s resources “must be reserved for matters of genuine controversy”.
“Those resources must not be used re-agitating arguments that have been already exhaustively dealt with, and on each occasion deemed unmeritorious, by the Commission,” she said.
“Ms Rowe has not highlighted any matters of that have not already be heard and determined by this Commission and it would be a waste of the Commission’s resources to hear this appeal.”
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