No Jab. No Job. No Justice

Warren Tredrea is a former AFL player and sports presenter (above) with the Nine Network. He spent 14 years in the AFL and 13 years in media, eight of those with Nine. And yet Tredrea was fired from his position as a sports presenter after attempting to exercise his right to refuse the compulsory Covid-19 vaccination demanded by his employer. 

Tredrea served as Nine’s sports presenter from 2013 to 2021, when his contract was summarily terminated because he refused to comply with the network’s vaccine mandate.[1] Nine introduced its vaccine mandate in December 2021, requiring all staff to have at least two doses of Covid-19 vaccine. Tredrea, who considers himself ‘pro-choice’ on vaccines, refused to be coerced. “I’m fully vaccinated … but I’m not Covid vaccinated. Everyone is entitled to what they want to do because it’s your body,” he said.[2]

Tredrea was sacked in January 2022 before he could return to the Nine network after the summer holidays. His sacking cost him a high-profile job with an annual salary of $192,500. He brought an unfair dismissal case against Channel 9 Adelaide in the Federal Court of Australia, claiming he had been unfairly sacked for breaching the broadcaster’s vaccine mandate.[3] He wanted the remainder of his 2022 salary, which amounted to $176,458, plus a further compensation for lost income – total fee of $1,481,104.

Tredrea basically argued that Nine’s direction requiring staff to be vaccinated was unreasonable because the Covid virus posed a low risk of illness to healthy people like him. Besides, he also argued that the vaccine was not particularly effective, and it presented potential health risks to recipients.[4] As a consequence, he argued, the broadcaster unfairly terminated his contract as a sport presenter.[5]

Nine countered that it dismissed him not just for refusing to be compulsorily vaccinated but also for supposedly causing the network “reputational damage”. During the case, Channel 9 Adelaide’s director, Jeremy Pudney, told the court that Tredrea’s dismissal was also motivated by the impacts on the network’s reputation following “inaccurate” comments made on a local radio station about the Covid-19 vaccine.[6]  The ABC reported that Pudney told the court he was “alarmed” by Tredrea’s opinions and had told him that it was “not constructive to talk about such a hot-button issue … with factual errors”.[7] For good measure, Nine also claimed Tredrea wasn’t a good commentator — an alleged deficiency it apparently took the network eight years to recognise.

The case was run by Tredrea’s lawyers primarily on the fact that he was sacked for not been vaccinated. On March 14, the lawsuit brought by Tredrea was dismissed by the Federal Court. In his judgment, Justice Geoffrey Kennett stated that Tredrea may have had a more compelling case if he had merely focused on his refusal to be vaccinated. The court had heard how Tredrea had voiced his opinions about mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations on Adelaide radio station 5AA. “Those opinions were not particularly well-informed and some of Mr Tredrea’s arguments were not soundly based”, Justice Kennett wrote in his judgment.[8]

Justice Kennett therefore dismissed Tredrea’s application by agreeing with Channel Nine’s claim that it had a right to terminate his contract to protect itself from “reputational damage.” Justice Kennett said: “The evidence does not show that the decision to terminate the services agreement was anything other than a reasonable one, in the sense of a bona fide attempt to protect Channel Nine’s legitimate interests”.[9] Nine as an employer apparently had an interest in its workers being able to come to work without disruption and to respect the “wishes and concerns of the significant majority of the workforce who wanted the people with whom they had contact to be vaccinated”.[10]

Justice Kennett also found that Tredrea would have posed a reputational risk to the company through his outspoken public comments against the Covid vaccine, which were opposed to Nine’s public position, the judgment said, observing “rather than having the studied neutrality of a newsreader, he was associated in public discourse with an unpopular viewpoint on an issue apt to excite strong emotions”.[11] Kennett added that “it did not help that the viewpoint with which he was associated was diametrically opposed to the public position of Channel 9 itself”.[12]  

Some of the comments made by Justice Kennett deserve a more careful consideration. For example, the claim that Tredrea’s view of the vaccines caused “reputational damage” to Channel Nine is not shared by millions of equally concerned Australians. After all, they now know that mRNA vaccines prevent neither infection nor transmission of the virus.

For example, a study conducted by the Upper Midwest Regional Accelerator for Genomic Surveillance, founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, concluded that the vaccinated can still catch and transmit Covid and, once infected, they are as likely to infect others as the unvaccinated.^[13] As another example, a recent study by Cleveland Clinic researchers concluded that people who received two or more doses of the vaccine were more likely to get infected with Covid. They found that, among 48,344 working-aged clinic employees, those not “up-to-date” on vaccination had a lower risk of contracting Covid-19 than those who are “up-to-date”.^[14]

“If a vaccine fails to stop disease transmission, then the idea that you need to vaccinate other people so that I’m protected is just false”, says Dr Jayanta Bhattcharya,^[15] a professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University.^[16]

There is also evidence that Covid vaccines are responsible for the surge in the death rates since 2021. A cost-benefit analysis by a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looked at official data from the UK and the US for all age groups to determine the risk of dying from Covid. “All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID vaccination than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID death”, the report says.^[17] Furthermore, “all age groups under 80 years old have virtually not benefited from receiving a COVID vaccine, and the younger ages incur significant risks”.^[18]

The lack of confidence in the efficacy of vaccine mandates is exacerbated when one considers the standards that vaccines should exhibit. There are at least five medical requirements that need to be met: (i) the vaccine must result in a measurable reduction in the number of sick people afflicted with the Covid-19 virus, (ii) the vaccine must be capable of protecting recipients for a significant time, thereby possibly avoiding booster shots, (iii) the vaccine should have few negative side effects, (iv) the vaccine must be effective against newer variants of the virus, and (v) the vaccine must substantially reduce transmission rates. The Covid-19 vaccines substantially fail to meet these requirements.

One known and serious potential risk is myocarditis—inflammation of the heart. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now acknowledges the evidence shows that mRNA vaccines have caused many types of heart conditions, including myocarditis.^[19] In fact, even Pfizer scientists now acknowledge increased cases of myocarditis after vaccination.^[20]

These concerns about adverse side effects of Covid vaccines are too serious to ignore. So, given the already known potential harms of the novel vaccines, of which myocarditis is just one, and the entirely unknown potential long-term adverse effects which may become known only in the future, the decision to vaccinate everyone, including healthy people, regardless of age or health conditions, is highly problematic and not scientific.

As can be seen, the suspicion that Tredrea had about the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines has been strengthened by the empirical data.^[21] The potential for severe injury is now fully demonstrated and a matter that deserves more serious reflection.

So, the question is, has Channel Nine potentially endangered their employees’ health by disregarding the possible effects and making compulsory the acceptance of an experimental vaccination? If so, how could Tredrea’s termination have been reasonable, considering the ineffectiveness of the vaccine at preventing transmission in the workplace and the availability of meaningfully effective alternative strategies?

This goes without saying that the implementation of mandatory Covid vaccination sits uncomfortably with the High Court’s jurisprudence. Justice Kirby opined in 2009, in Wong v Commonwealth; Selim v Professional Services Review Committee,^[22] that the purpose of prohibiting the “conscription” in section 51(xxiiiA) of the Australian Constitution is to ensure that there is no impermissible obligation on people to accept a medical or pharmaceutical treatment which they can refuse on constitutional grounds.

Justice Kirby’s opinion is supported by the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“Siracusa Principles”). A document produced by the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists, the Siracusa Principles explicitly state that “No state party shall, even in time of emergency threatening the life of the nation” compromise the rights of people to freely consent to medical or scientific experimentation, “even for the asserted purpose of preserving the life of the nation.”

Consistent with the Siracusa Principles, in a climate of uncertainty, characterised by a demonstrable lack of confidence, a program of mandatory vaccination cannot be regarded as consensual. From the perspective of international law, the right to informed consent is the bedrock principle of ethical standards in medicine. According to Article 6:1 of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005):

Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

The right to refuse vaccination is also supported by the Nuremberg Code – an ethics code – relied upon during the Nazi doctors’ trials in Nuremberg. This Code has as its first principle the willingness and informed consent by the individual to receive medical treatment and/or to participate in an experiment. Moreover, Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights informs us that “States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.”

It is precisely the experimental nature of the Covid-19 vaccines and the widespread disagreement about their capacity to provide protection against the virus that is responsible for the lack of confidence in their effectiveness. Indeed, in a climate of uncertainty, characterised by a demonstrable lack of confidence, as is amply demonstrated by the levels of vaccine hesitancy in Australia, a company’s inoculation mandate violates its employee’s rights as it simply cannot be regarded as consensual nor based on a contractual relationship. The unvaccinated employee, in relying on health implications for the purpose of refusing the vaccine, may invoke the same argument used by proponents of vaccinations, who also rely on health grounds to promote the vaccine.

Ian Hanke pointed out the problems associated with government-directed vaccine mandates:

These extraordinary powers are arbitrary and extreme. They are a draconian attack on civil liberties the like of which Australia has never seen before. Further because all laws are overridden there would appear to be little recourse to any excesses by an authorised officer or their civilians co-opted by them. These laws are so broad and ill-defined that you could be detained for almost anything.[23]

In this context, Dr Rocco Loiacono comments:

For any government either by itself or via corporate proxy to attempt to mandate vaccines in circumstances were there has not been adequate testing and analysis of risks as well as benefits would constitute not only a violation of the principle of informed consent … but a violation of Australia’s obligations under international law with respect to medical experimentation.[24]

Hence, any law that requires vaccine mandates either directly or indirectly, is not only constitutionally invalid, but it also constitutes a violation of Australia’s obligations under public international law.

Of course, a medical treatment which is imposed on an employee without his or her informed consent is a trespass upon that person. In Bowater v Rowley Regis Corp, Lord Justice Scott explained that consent to treatment, including vaccination, is needed to proceed with the treatment:

… a man cannot be said to be truly ‘willing’ unless he is in a position to choose freely, and freedom of choice predicates, not only full knowledge of the circumstances on which the exercise of choice is conditioned, so that he may be able to choose wisely, but in the absence from his mind of any feeling of restraint so that nothing shall interfere with the freedom of his will.^[25]

Importantly, the jurisprudence of the High Court indicates that no employer in Australia should impose limitations on the rights of employees that directly or indirectly amount to a form of mandatory medical or pharmaceutical treatment. And if governments cannot constitutionally force anyone to be vaccinated, they certainly cannot indirectly create a situation whereby any employee would be forced to take the vaccine. This point is addressed in a comment of Justice Webb in British Medical Association v Commonwealth:

If Parliament cannot lawfully do this directly by legal means it cannot lawfully do it indirectly by creating a situation, as distinct from merely taking advantage of one, in which the individual is left no real choice but compliance” (emphasis added).^[26]

At least Tredrea will not have to pay his former employer’s legal fees, with Justice Kennett making “no order as to the costs of the proceeding”.[27] This is because of the operation of section 17 of the South Australian Independent Contractors Act (ICA) which governed Tredrea’s legal action. The ICA included a costs section which replicated the protections given to employees under traditional re-instatement/unfair dismissal laws. He will pay “only” for his own legal costs while Nine will cover their successful defence of the claim. [28]

In April, Tredrea formally lodged an appeal with the Federal Court, seeking to challenge Justice Kennett’s dismissal of his claim. In our view, he has good grounds to appeal because the dismissal was clearly unfair, because there are profoundly serious risks attached to any new drug, and Covid-19 vaccines had a limited short-term efficacy and no long-term safety data. As an article from the British Medical Journal points out,  

From a public health standpoint, it makes poor sense to impose vaccine side-effects on people at minimal risk of severe COVID-19. The argument that it protects others is weak or contrary to evidence. This conclusion suggests a policy of targeting vaccination to those at highest risk, allowing broader post-infection immunity to provide community protection.^[29]

Given the already known potential harms of these novel vaccines, of which myocarditis is just one, and the entirely unknown potential long-term adverse effects which may come to light only after many years, the decision of Channel 9 to require his vaccination was not only illegal but also morally and scientifically wrong.

We hope that at the level of appeal the court finally makes the right decision.  

Augusto Zimmermann is head of law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Western Australia. Zimmermann is a former commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017). He is also a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. During his time at Murdoch, he was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research, in 2012. 

Gabriël A. Moens AM is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland. He served as pro vice-chancellor and dean at Murdoch University. In 2003, Moens was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal by the prime minister for services to education. He has taught extensively across Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Moens and Zimmermann are the authors of ‘The Unlucky Country’ (Locke Press, 2024). To order your copy, click at https://lockepress.com/product/the-unlucky-country/

[1] Jesse Hyland and Jo Scrimshire, ‘Ex-AFL star Warren Tredrea leaves behind a $300,000-per-year-job as Nine News Adelaide’s sports presenter after refusing to get the Covid vaccine’, Daily Mail Australia, 8 February 2022, at  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10487749/AFL-Warren-Tredrea-loses-300-000-job-Nine-refusing-Covid-vaccine.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jacob Shteyman, ‘AFL great Tredrea has unfair dismissal claim thrown out’, InDaily,14 March 2024, at https://www.indaily.com.au/news/2024/03/14/afl-great-tredrea-has-unfair-dismissal-claim-thrown-out.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Olivia Mason, ‘Warren Tredrea avoids having to pay Channel 9 legal fees after losing unfair dismissal case’, ABC News, 3 May 2024, at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-03/warren-tredrea-spared-from-paying-channel-nine-legal-fees/103802824.

[7] ‘Former AFL player Warren Tredrea loses $6 million unfair dismissal case against Channel 9’, Fox Footy, 15 March 2024, at https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/former-afl-player-warren-tredrea-loses-6-million-unfair-dismissal-case-against-channel-9/news-story/686c67ec5e5449d7b020b9695a3e6bb2.

[8] Tredders Investments Pty Ltd as trustee for Warren Tredrea Trust v Channel 9 South Australia (No 3) [2024] FCA 233 [169d] (14 March 2024)

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Kasen K Riemersma et al., ‘Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Individuals Have a Similar Viral Loads in Communities with a High Prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant’, MedRxiv, 31 July 2021, at  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1?

[14] Nabin K. Shrestha, Patrick C. Burke, Any S. Nowacki, and Steven M. Gordon, ‘Risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) among Those Up-to-Date and Not Up-to-Date on COVID-19 Vaccination’, MedRxiv, 12 June 2023, at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.09.23290893v1.full.pdf

[15] At https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

[16] Matthew Horwood, ‘Researcher and Professor Criticize COVID-19 Vaccine Trials at National Citizen’s Inquiry’, The Epoch Times, April 13, 2023, at https://www.theepochtimes.com/researcher-and-professor-criticize-covid-19-vaccine-trials-at-national-citizens-inquiry_5193190.html.

[17] Stephanie Seneff PhD and Kathy Dopp MS, ‘COVID-19 and All-Cause Mortality Data by Age Group Reveals Risk of COVID Vaccine-Induced Fatality is Equal to or Greater than the Risk of a COVID death for all Age Groups Under 80 Years Old as of 6 February 2022’, 13 February 2022, at https://www.skirsch.com/covid/Seneff_costBenefit.pdf.

[18] Ibid. f

[19] Zachary Stieber, ‘Pfizer Identified ‘Most Likely’ Mechanism for Heart Inflammation After COVID-19 Vaccination’, The Epoch Times, 22 March 2023, at https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/pfizer-identified-most-likely-mechanism-for-heart-inflammation-after-covid-19-vaccination_5139370.html?ea_src=open&ea_med=search.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Zachary Stieber, ‘Australian Authorities to Stop Reporting Vaccination Status of Hospitalizations, Deaths’, Nexus Newsfed.com, 9 January 2023 < https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/health-healing/australian-authorities-to-stop-reporting-vaccination-status-of-hospitalizations-deaths/>.

[22] Wong v Commonwealth; Selim v Professional Services Review Committee (2009) 236 CLR 573.

[23] Ian Hanke, ‘Daniel Andrews’ Plan For Indefinite Detention – And More’, The Spectator Australia, 18 September 2020, at https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/09/daniel-andrews-plan-for-indefinite-detention-and-more/

[24] Rocco Loiacono, ‘Most Covid patients at Israeli hospital fully vaccinated? What does this mean for Australia?’, The Spectator Australia, 12 August 2021, at https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/08/most-covid-patients-at-israeli-hospital-fully-vaccinated-what-does-this-mean-for-australia/.

[25] Bowater v Rowley Regis Corp [1944] KB 476, at 479 (Scott LJ).

[26] British Medical Association v Commonwealth (1949) 79 CLR 201, at 293 (Webb J).

[27] Tredders Investments Pty Ltd as trustee for Warren Tredrea Trust v Channel 9 South Australia (No 4) [2024] FCA 453.

[28] Olivia Mason, ‘Warren Tredrea avoids having to pay Channel 9 legal fees after losing unfair dismissal case’, ABC News, 3 May 2024, at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-03/warren-tredrea-spared-from-paying-channel-nine-legal-fees/103802824.

[29] David Bell and Roland Salmon, ‘Public Health Logic of COVID-19 Vaccinations’, The British Medical Journal, 6 September 2021, at https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2180/rr-4. See also: “Covid-19: JCVI Opts Not to Recommend Universal Vaccination of 12-15 Year Olds’, The British Medical Journal, 03 September 2021, at https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2180.