Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak in this matter of public importance discussion on Australia’s health and productivity. I have listened carefully to the members opposite talk about their achievements, but the reality is that the experts are telling us that if we do not intervene very soon the next generation of Australians will be less healthy than the previous generation of Australians for the very first time. Since settlement of this country every generation has looked forward to a better health system, better life expectancy and better health. We have managed to turn that around and, as I said, if there is no intervention for the very first time we will be looking at a generation that will have a lesser standard of health than we have. That will have an impact on Australia’s productivity.

Growth in Australia’s productivity has been in free-fall, from a growth rate of 2.6 per cent per annum in the 1990s to 2.1 per cent in the early part of this decade and to one per cent since 2003. Irrespective of which way you look at it, this government has done little to actively address and improve the connection between health and productivity, which would ensure the earning capacity of the nation’s employees and the ability of the nation’s families to make ends meet through their work. The government may point to statistics and claim that it had something to do with increases here or decreases there, but fundamentally this government pays comparatively less attention to the planning and execution of national wealth-creating and sustainable strategies than it does to the polls, as we have seen recently. No doubt that is what we are going to hear tonight in the 2007 budget speech.

Professor Warwick McKibbin, the Reserve Bank’s longest serving board member, recently criticised the government’s lack of action in the areas of education, infrastructure, climate change, tax reform and workforce participation. Australia’s productivity has been abandoned. Information technology, communication and other infrastructure continue to languish. Real apprenticeships continue to be as scarce as hen’s teeth. Small business regulation continues to hold people back from what they do best. And now the prediction is that, with the next generation having a less healthy lifestyle, productivity will be put into some form of danger. The government’s sole policy in addressing Australia’s capacity to earn a living and fund our future ageing population has been to cut wages and conditions—that is all we have seen; that has been their cornerstone. Work Choices, which is all we have heard, is less pay now and poorer old age for the future.

But the workforce’s capacity to work also demands attention. Just as the nation’s aggregate age can compromise the nation’s capacity to work and fund our individual and collective future, so the ability of those of working age to engage in employment within the workforce will be compromised as a result of the high prevalence of preventable disease. Mental health, type 2 diabetes, serious injury, cardiovascular disease, cancer and skeletal disease are six diseases alone that account for around 70 per cent of the disease burden of the working age population. The workforce’s participation rate is not at risk due to disease alone. Lifestyle choices, pastimes and other factors can induce absenteeism and substantially decrease participation rates. Alcohol consumption and risk-taking activities all play their part. The general population had a workforce participation rate of 65 per cent up to 2005. Mental health, the most devastating and costly of the six target diseases, decreases participation rates by almost half to 35 per cent.

Other diseases might not yet be having such a devastating effect on the working population, but one might expect the prevalence and severity of these other diseases to increase over time. The incidence of diabetes, for instance, has doubled globally over the past few decades. In Australia the number of people with diabetes is now over a million, increasing by 100,000 per year, and is characterised as the epidemic of the future.

What we have seen over the last 10 years of this government is a preference to ignore an issue, minimise its consequences and challenge our capacity to act. If the Prime Minister cannot get away with doing nothing anymore, he just denounces responsibility. I have heard from my colleagues about recent reports of the number of children being hospitalised, for example, for dental treatment and that has increased by 29 per cent over the last decade. (Time expired)

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