MARK LATHAM: Why do both Liberal and Labor insist we need vaccine passports?

Sometimes you read something and, out of shock, you need to go back and look at it a second time.

That's how I felt when I saw the NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns in Daily Mail Australia thanking 'frontline workers'.

Minns' policy is not to thank them.

It's to support Gladys Berejiklian in sacking tens of thousands of NSW nurses, paramedics, police, teachers, tradies, construction workers and retail and hospitality staff for being unvaccinated.

Historically, one of the most important principles of the trade union movement was that workers were in charge of their own bodies and health choices, not employers and politicians.

Minns has thrown that out the window with his support for forced workplace vaccinations and vaccine passports.

Labor MPs and union officials have abandoned people who have paid their union fees for decades and simply want someone to represent their needs.

I speak to them every day, trying to keep them in work and out of Centrelink.

Invariably, they are people waiting for the safest vaccine: Pfizer, Moderna or Novavax.

They are victims of Scott Morrison’s botched vaccine-rollout which over-ordered on AstraZeneca.

Or they are people who haven't had a jab for 30 or 40 years and are suffering anxiety depression. Or they have a history of medical problems and adverse reactions in their family.

Some are conscientious objectors, but not many.

All of them are stunned at how the Labor Movement has abandoned them, throwing them on the welfare scrapheap for wanting to make their own health choices.

Minns and Berejiklian are yet to explain how sacking people will make us a healthier and better society.

Six months from now, Minns and the unions will be complaining that foreign workers are being brought in to fill staff shortages in our hospitals, schools and building sites.

Given that Australia has lagged behind the rest of the world in Covid-vaccination rates, we would be silly not to learn from the European experience in particular.

They are finding that vaccination doesn’t kill off Covid in the community, as vaccinated people can carry and spread the virus.

Vaccination's main benefit is in reducing the severity of the illness. It turns it into a bad flu, thereby lowering hospitalisation rates.

The vaccinated have nothing to fear from unvaccinated people, as they have gone out and got their best protection.

There is no reason for treating the unvaccinated as lepers, which is what Vaccine Passports do – denying them access to shops and other venues.

The Berejiklian/Minns policy sets up a scenario by which someone can turn up at a pub sneezing and spluttering, show their Vaccine Passport and gain entry, while an unvaxxed patron who has passed a Rapid Antigen Test is turned away.

Just when European countries are abandoning vaccine passports as divisive and impractical, Minns' chief complaint is that they are not happening fast enough in NSW.

The worst thing about the Berejiklian/Minns policy is that it's unnecessary.

Last month NSW agreed to the National Cabinet Plan of fully opening up at 80% herd-immunity vaccination.

With NSW now steaming to 85 or even 90% double-dose vaccination rates, why do we need more sackings, more division and more conflict in society?