HEART Party

Summary

Policies & Commentary

It may have changed its name to a catchy little acronym (Heart Environment Accountability Rights Transparency) that lends itself to any number of nifty slogans, but scratch the surface of the HEART Party (hereafter referred to as HP), and oh look. It’s our old friends, the Informed Medical Options Party (IMOP), crusaders against vaccination and fluoride.

At the 2022 election, HP (then IMOP) tried to ride a wave of anti-lockdown sentiment and hysteria surrounding Covid-19 vaccines, all the way into Parliament. It failed. Miserably – it was only able to gain 0.18% in the House of Representatives, and 0.32% in the Senate. Undaunted, it’s back to try its luck again. This time, it’s joined up with the Libertarians, Great Australian Party, Katter’s Australian Party, and Gerard Rennick’s People First Party to form the confusing (and rapidly collapsing) Australia First Alliance. Whether the Alliance lasts long enough for me to actually post this article is anyone’s guess.

As for policies – as you might expect given its history, HP is rabidly anti-vaccination. It still has a preoccupation with Covid-19 vaccines, calling for Royal Commissions into both the government’s management of the pandemic and into claims that Australians have died or been harmed by vaccinations. Quite what it hopes to achieve here is unclear, since there have already been multiple enquiries at state and federal level into our pandemic response, as well as Senate enquiries into so-called “vaccine injuries”. No, I take that back. What it wants is very clear – a Royal Commission stacked with its hydroxychloroquine-chewing, bleach-guzzling fantasists, who believe that Covid-19 vaccines are to blame for a death months after a second dose, when a person suffered a catastrophic brain injury after a fall. I wish I was making that up. Those who have purchased their one-way tickets on the “vaccine injury” train to Cookerville have cited this particular case as “proof” of the awful evilness of the Pfizer vaccine.

The anti-vax stance goes much further, however. HP wants an end to all mandatory vaccinations. This is dressed up as a “rights” issue, as though an individual’s choices must always take precedence over any public good. What it would mean, in practice, is that if you sought treatment in a hospital, HP would be okay with you or your children receiving nursing care from someone potentially exposed to any number of preventable diseases. HP’s founder, Michael O’Neill, is so wedded to anti-vax nonsense that his manifesto includes a diatribe against what he calls media-inflamed hysteria over what used to be normal and non-lethal childhood diseases.

This is not merely irresponsible – it’s downright dangerous. Thanks to anti-vaccine activists, there are currently 712 confirmed cases of measles in the USA alone, resulting in mass hospitalisation and, tragically, the deaths of two children. In Australia, there have been 59 cases so far this year, already surpassing the total number for the entirety of 2024. Measles is a disease which can have horrific complications, and survivors of serious illness can suffer permanent brain damage, reduced immune function, or blindness. And that’s just one of the vaccine-preventable diseases that HP would apparently be fine with inflicting on Australian society.

Hand in hand with its anti-vax policy is HP’s support for natural and complementary therapies, which it advocates should be supported by government for use in public hospitals, private practice, the NDIS, and the mental health sector. On its face, this isn’t an entirely terrible idea; therapies such as meditation and massage are recognised by qualified health practitioners as helping to produce good outcomes in conjunction with more conventional therapies.

The problem is that many so-called “natural” therapies, dispensed by people with no more qualifications than a 12 week course in “Aroma Touch”, have proven harmful effects. In the US measles outbreak mentioned above, hospitals in anti-vax heartland West Texas have reported treating children suffering from Vitamin A toxicity, after natural therapy advocates recommended giving children large doses to treat measles. Add to that the completely wacky idea of “curing” whatever ails you by drinking either your own “aged urine” or so much colloidal silver that you turn blue, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

HP apparently sees no contradiction between urging for the inclusion of these dangerous and untested “therapies”, while heavily restricting and penalising the makers of scientifically tested medicines whose manufacture is controlled by government regulation. Because apparently consistency is the hobgoblin of its very small collective mind.

In its crusade against public health and taking sensible measures to mitigate disease outbreaks, HP declares its intention to pass a Bill of Rights that would not only prevent the government from issuing any form of travel restriction or lockdown order, but also protect those who spread medical misinformation from being challenged or prosecuted for their irresponsible behaviour. While they’re at it, HP wants us out of the World Health Organisation, because they can’t tell us what to do, they’re not the boss of us, ner ner ner.

There’s more to HP’s health and “rights” policies, but almost all of it has one goal in mind: enshrining anti-science as Australia’s primary, if not only, response to questions of public health. I mean, we’re talking about a party that thinks children should be sacrificed on the altar of their parents’ ideology, for goodness’ sake. No chemotherapy for you, little Timmy, your Mum and I are going to treat your leukaemia with positive thinking, aged urine, and ionised water.

Oh, and parents shouldn’t have to worry about the government stepping in to rescue their children from this kind of abusive behaviour. HP wants to arrange things so that even if children are removed from dangerous situations, their parents can still dictate what, if any, medical treatment they receive. Parental rights, you see, are all-important.

Oh, wait.

Apparently those parental rights would end if a parent supports their child seeking an abortion or wanting to commence gender-affirming care. HP wants none of that, thank you very much. It doesn’t say specifically that it’s against reproductive choice, but its policy on the subject is all about finding ways to make someone carry their pregnancy to term. It’s also conspicuously silent in its major policy document about gender affirming care, but in O’Neill’s manifesto, the opposition is very clear.

Hypocrisy. It’s not just for free speech anymore.

The inconsistencies continue when it comes to environmental policy. On the one hand, HP has some very sensible suggestions about how government might better assess the environmental impact of various farming practices, and for strengthening regulations around contaminated water runoff into rivers and the ocean. On the other, it advocates:

Calling for the consideration of all academic perspectives when evaluating the definition, causes and solutions to the subject of ‘climate change’.

Those little quotation marks are the giveaway. Whether for reasons of ideology or simple political expediency, HP has deliberately chosen to present climate change as nothing more than an academic discussion rather than a day-to-day reality. I understand it’s fashionable at the moment to “get retro” about climate change skepticism (Liberal leader Peter Dutton was quick to follow this trend at the Leaders Debate last night), but it undermines an otherwise strong set of HP’s environmental policies.

In the economic sphere, HP appears to have adopted the usual right-leaning minor party practice of simply pasting in Liberal Party policies. You know how that song goes – cut red tape, cut jobs from the public service, less regulation on business, blah blah blah. Where HP shows its conspiracy theorist colours is in its policies regarding cash transactions. You see, HP is deeply paranoid about government being able to find out how many Krispy Kreme glazed donuts you bought at Seven-Eleven last time you had a craving, or whether you stopped off for a dodgy kebab after a long night of clubbing. Quite why the government should care about how you spend your everyday money is never addressed. Neither is there any acknowledgement of the massive bureaucracy that would need to be in place to even start to investigate the millions of transactions that take place in just one day.

HP is also paranoid about ’Smart Cities’, which it characterises as a small urban area that is some kind of Orwellian surveillance state where everything you do and everywhere you go is monitored, and the data collected is used for some unspecified – but undoubtedly nefarious – purpose. This is a gross exaggeration. Smart Cities by no means employ the kind of 24 hour all-pervasive spying that HP claims. In a smart city, public lighting is connected to sensors so that if people aren’t in a particular area, those lights are dimmed to reduce power costs. Public wi-fi is made available to all. Traffic flow is monitored to reduce congestion. And the data? Is used to plan better infrastructure.

But you can’t tell HP that. Mired in its suspicion of all things not associated with crystal therapy and the right to kill your children through medical neglect, it’s not the slightest bit interested in facts. It much prefers to mutter its vague jeremiads about how the government wants to control your “freedoms”.

And that’s what it’s all about for HP – freedom. More specifically, free rein, for anti-vaxers, for discredited and dangerous “therapies”, and for medical misinformation; Free rein to persecute and punish those who might dare to suggest that vaccines and properly regulated medicines save lives.

And no freedom at all for anyone who dares to suggest that maybe, just maybe, HP and its followers encourage criminally irresponsible behaviour with their anti-science rubbish, and should be held to account for it.

It really is a race to the bottom this election. At this point I may have to roll a dice to see who goes last on my ballots.