The former New South Wales Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet has declared Covid-19 vaccine mandates were “wrong” and a “mistake” in the valedictory speech marking the end of his 13-year career in parliament.
Perrottet formally bowed out of NSW politics on Tuesday after announcing last month he would resign as the member for Epping and move with his family to Washington DC, to work as the US head of corporate and external relations at mining company BHP.
“If the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as is mostly now accepted, the law should have left more room and respect for freedom,” he told parliament in his final speech.
Perrottet praised his parliamentary colleagues and the senior health bureaucrats who shepherded the state through the pandemic, saying “we got more right than wrong”.
“Without dwelling on every decision, I believe it’s important to point out one
mistake which was made by governments here and around the world: the strict enforcement of vaccine mandates,” he said.
Perrottet said health officials and governments were “acting with the right intentions” when they imposed strict orders on certain industries requiring people to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
“Vaccines saved lives. But ultimately mandates were wrong. People’s personal choices shouldn’t have cost them their jobs,” he said.
Perrottet became NSW’s youngest ever premier at 39 when he took on the job in 2021 after Gladys Berejiklian’s shock departure from politics.
On Tuesday he described his push to convert every poker machine in NSW to cashless gaming – before he lost the 2023 election to Labor – as one of his biggest reform ideas.
“I look forward to the day these machines of misery in their factories of despair no longer feed on some of the most vulnerable people in the state,” he said.
Perrottet also criticised the federation and said the federal government’s encroachment into service delivery – such as with the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Broadband Network – had been an “abject failure”.
He said federal governments should be elected for fixed, four-year terms, to give them “more time on reforming and less time on campaigning”.
Perrottet thanked all the political colleagues and public servants he worked with, as well as his personal staff, many of them by name.
His parents, his wife, Helen, and their seven children, watched from a packed public gallery along with several former federal and state Liberal ministers.
