No Mandatory Vaccination Party has registration delayed by fake members, including from Wesley College

Mischief makers – including some from a prestigious Perth private school – have held up the registration of the No Mandatory Vaccination Party ahead of the Federal election after submitting scores of fake membership applications. In a since deleted Facebook post, party founder and WA man Cam Tinley said some of the sign-ups had come “during school hours” from Wesley College in South Perth. “Our submission to the AEC has been held up because we have had to trawl through our database and eliminate all of the fake memberships submitted from @wesley.wa.edu.au,” Mr Tinley wrote. “All of these memberships were submitted during school hours. One wonders what what [sic] going on.” Mr Tinley told The West Australian he had found “a dozen” membership sign-ups bearing Wesley College email addresses that he suspected were fake. The former teacher – who forfeited his job at Atwell College over his refusal to get vaccinated – said he had so far identified around 60 total party applications he suspected were fake. “They’ve got fake names or I check the addresses and they don’t exist,” he said. “I’m not worried (about the Wesley College sign-ups), I’m just annoyed. They are probably Year 12s who have now left the school.” Wesley College was approached for comment. The Australian Electoral Commission requires political party’s seeking to register to contest a Federal election to provide a list of 1500 genuine members. Mr Tinley said although the No Mandatory Vaccination Party’s membership was “close to 3000”, AEC rules only allowed him to submit 1650 members – all of whom had to provide a full name, residential address and date of birth that matched the electoral roll. “The AEC puts all the names through a filter and then starts knocking them out,” he said. “If I put in 1650, that can be whittled down to fewer than 1500 in no time – and then you have a huge problem. “If you have some fake members in there intentionally trying to sabotage you they could easily get rung up by the AEC and say they’re not a member.” The single-issue No Mandatory Vaccination Party attracted 1.6 per cent of the total vote at last years’ WA election and narrowly missed out on securing an Upper House seat in the South Metropolitan region as a result of preference flows. Mr Tinley said the party was planning to run candidates in every electorate across Australia at the Federal election but complained the registration process was proving far harder than at State level. “In WA I only needed 500 members but the AEC rules make it very, very difficult – you need three times as many and have to really be 100 per cent right with their details,” he said. The No Mandatory Vaccination Party runs on a platform of repealing mandates requiring workers to be jabbed as a condition of their employment – although Mr Tinley said not all members and candidates were anti-vaxxers. “We are not restricting our candidates from being vaccinated. Some people thought we should only run unvaccinated candidates. That got knocked on the head pretty quickly,” he said.