(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

The vaccine mandate issue continues to dog the government — and a worried prime minister is running a mile from it. The consequences may end up being deeply damaging for many businesses and hurt the recovery — if we ever get one while the NSW government lets the Delta variant run rampant through Sydney.

Last week Scott Morrison’s position on businesses requiring employees to be vaccinated was to play observer-in-chief, promising only that the government would stand by and watch. To be overgenerous, he could have been forgiven for that line given the issue had blown up more quickly than anyone thought. Most of us still haven’t been able to get a jab even if we want to. But cannery SPC’s announcement it would introduce a mandate for employee vaccines by October forced the issue.

Since then, however, Morrison has actually hardened his position on business vaccine mandates. On Monday he described them as a “mandatory vaccination program by the government, by stealth”.

“We are not going to seek to impose a mandatory vaccination program in this country by some other means,” he said.

This is another candidate for the long list of Morrison lies and falsehoods, because allowing business to require employees to be vaccinated would hardly be a mandatory vaccination program by stealth. The case for allowing businesses to require vaccines is rock solid: if they have a physical workplace they have a duty of care to their employees around safety in that workplace, and one to their customers if they interact with the public.

Businesses are already required through various forms of regulation to provide safe working environments. We have safety mandates, we have food quality mandates, we have qualification mandates. The fact that you can’t work as an electrician without the appropriate training and certification isn’t some outrageous infringement on personal freedom, it’s a basic to ensure the safety of colleagues and the public.

So resistant is the government to providing any assistance or guidance to employers, however, that there’s confusion about whether they can ask employees if they’ve been vaccinated, with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s advice riddled with weasel words.

This isn’t some accidental feature of the industrial relations system, but the result of a deliberate policy by the government to avoid the issue, leaving businesses in the lurch and likely stymieing investment and hiring plans, endangering workers and customers and creating the risk of outbreaks once restrictions begin being lifted.

Business is naturally crying foul, for once justifiably, and The Australian Financial Review — finally working out this is an issue after Crikey raised it last week — editorialised yesterday on the need for certainty, pitching the issue in terms of the “Team Australia” drivel it has been peddling throughout the pandemic.

But why did Morrison harden his rhetoric against mandates between Friday and Monday? Normally the government is happy to fall into line with business demands but Morrison — who needs no excuse to avoid leading anyway — is fenced in by extremists and denialists in his own ranks.

There are the usual suspects like pandemic denialist George Christensen, who made his umpteenth threat to cross the floor on vaccine passports. Morrison is terrified of offending Christensen and will say and do anything to avoid encouraging him to split from the LNP in his last months in politics.

But there are threats closer to home on the issue. At the weekend, NSW state Liberal MP Tanya Davies attacked her own government for requiring tradies from selected local government areas with high infection rates to be vaccinated or not return to work on construction sites. She promised to introduce a bill to outlaw vaccine mandates.

Davies explicitly said Morrison’s “watching” wasn’t good enough and he should ban mandates.

The MP — who tried to bring NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian down over her failure to stop the bill decriminalising abortion in NSW — is a Christian fundamentalist from the NSW hard right and a government advocate for the scandal-plagued Hillsong, with links to the Australian Christian Lobby. And she’s not alone within Morrison’s home branch in wanting to outlaw mandates.

That Morrison shifted his rhetoric to greater opposition on Monday speaks much about how Davies reflects extremist views within Liberal ranks as well as the wingnut sections of the LNP in Queensland.

The result will likely be fewer jobs, less investment and a slower recovery — not to mention more illness and deaths.

Does Australia need a vaccine mandate for workers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity