By Zoe McDonald
UQ constitutional law expert Professor Nicholas Aroney said the idea of ‘passports’ to enable citizens to travel within Australia was not a good precedent to set.
“People should ordinarily be free to move within the country without having to produce a passport or similar identification document,” he said.
“In Australia, we have a protection for freedom of movement between the states contained in section 92 of the Constitution, where any restrictions on movement have to be justified as proportionate to legitimate objectives.
“If we’re going to have a certificate or ‘passport’ of this kind, you need to be careful not to interfere with freedom of movement more than is necessary.”
“Restricting it to just a vaccine is more than is necessary, as there are less restrictive approaches that achieve the same objective – for example, if people have tested negative or have recovered from a COVID-19 infection.
“I am concerned about the tendency in Australia to refer to it as a ‘vaccine passport’; it should not be limited to those who are vaccinated and we should not normalise the idea that you need a ‘passport’ to move about the country.”
This excerpt is from the article Ticket to Freedom.
