Sydney home to lowest vaccination rates

The numbers were revealed in the third national report on immunisation rates released earlier in February.

“Once an epidemic gets momentum, if there’s 10 or 15 per cent of children who are not immunised, it can spread rapidly through the community," Western Sydney's Centre for Population Health director Stephen Corbett told AAP.

“Clearly our low rates say that we are not getting through to the people … we really have got to improve our performance.”

“The rate of one-year-olds vaccinated in many suburbs of Sydney remain below the target of 92-94 per cent deemed necessary to stop the spread of disease.”

Professor Corbett said the low immunisation rates seen in areas like Mt Druitt and Parramatta were due to a large immigrant population, lack of education around health and poor paperwork.

"But that doesn't distract us from our purpose. It is the little ones that are vulnerable to these illnesses,” Prof Corbett said.

Seven out of the 10 Australian suburbs with the lowest vaccination rates in one-year-olds were recorded in NSW.

And nearly 30,000 of the state’s children aged one to five are not fully vaccinated.

Conscientious objection in the state’s far north was among reasons driving the low rates of suburbs such as Byron Bay and Brunswick Heads, the worst in the country.

But, for the first time in 15 years, the number of parents recording objections to vaccinations fell, reducing the number of children not fully vaccinated due to objections from about 40,000 to just over 30,000.

Sydney University Medical School Associate Professor Julie Leask said there had been a lot of focus on clamping down on conscientious objectors, but access to clinics, parents getting time off work and simply forgetting were far more common reasons for missing immunisations.

“Australia needs to have a much better way of understanding this 9.1 per cent and why they are under-vaccinated … we just don't survey it any consistent way," she said.

Prof Leask said encouraging increases in the most vulnerable age groups had made the latest statistics a good sign as rates rose overall.

Efforts have already ramped up in western Sydney, according to Prof Corbett, with teams finding all the children who were unvaccinated and systematically immunising those falling through the gaps.

“We want to make sure that whoever people are, wherever they have come from, they are protected,” he said.

Catch-up vaccinations had also been in high demand over the past few months as the deadline for the federal government’s No Jab, No Pay policy came into effect.