Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not intend to speak for terribly long on the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority Bill 2008. There are a large number of speakers and I would like to say at the outset that I am very pleased that there is bipartisan support for this issue. My own attention was first drawn to even the possibility of organ transplant—although in this instance I suspect it may have been tissue transplant—as a very young person and an avid reader of Reader’s Digest. One of the stories was about a 10-year-old Canadian girl, who had died of leukaemia, whose wish was that her eyes could be used to give somebody sight. I guess that that has been something that has stayed with me for my entire life.

In my first speech in February I spoke of a very dear friend of mine, Ian Burgett, who had passed away in the previous April and whose organs I believe went to six other people. I was very touched by Ian’s daughter’s comments at his funeral. His daughter Ruth, while I cannot now give you the exact words that she spoke, made the point to all those who were in attendance, some 300 or 400 people, that in the depths of your own personal despair at the loss of your family member there are other families whose members are waiting for you to save the life of their loved one.

As a nation we really have to address the situation that exists at the moment. It really is not a terribly good story overall but there are some excellent stories in the transplant sector in Australia. Transplant is a device that we can use—thanks to medical technology and research—to assist people who are in the end stage of organ failure. If that end stage of organ failure happens to be your kidneys you can be kept alive with dialysis machines for a long time. That does not happen if your end-stage organ failure is your heart, liver or lungs, for example.

Survival rates are not too bad. Survival rates for a kidney transplant after one year are 90 per cent and after five years are 75 per cent. In 2007 there were 342 kidney transplants conducted in Australia. For a heart or liver transplant after one year your survival rate is 90 per cent and after five years it is 85 per cent. Again there were 56 heart transplants and 147 liver transplants in 2007. For pancreas transplants the survival rate is even a little more attractive. It is 94 per cent after one year and 87 per cent after five years. There were 33 transplants involving the pancreas in 2007. There were also six heart and lung transplants, eight lung transplants and 65 double lung transplants.

When you look at the numbers, you can see that there are quite a number of transplants conducted but that, as the member for Hindmarsh pointed out in his contribution, there are 1,700 to 1,800 people on the waiting list at any one time. Sadly or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, the vast majority of those are for kidney transplants. I am pleased that as a consequence of an election commitment made by the Rudd Labor government in 2007 there is a $7 million 12-chair dialysis unit being built at the North Lakes health precinct at the southern end of my electorate. I had the good fortune to tour there quite recently with people from Queensland Health to have a look at its progress. I can relay to my constituents that it is going fairly well.

It appears that 90 per cent of Australians support organ donation. However only one per cent of deaths occur where organs can be used, although tissue such as skin, cornea or bone can be used from a greater number of people who pass away and it can also be stored in banks.

In this country we have a single register, the Australian Organ Donor Register, AODR, which is administered by Medicare. I understand that until 30 April this year, 1.1 million people had registered—999,000 as donors and 11,000 registering their opposition to being donors. As the member for Hindmarsh was saying just a moment ago, quite often in Australia—and the legal people around here will understand the concept a little better than I do—if express consent is given but the next of kin object to a donation, it does not proceed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in many cases, at the height of their grief and in their lack of knowledge about the processes of organ donation or transplantation, family members decline to allow their loved one’s organs to be used. Some time afterwards they will come back to the hospital to apologise for their lack of knowledge, having gone away and learnt about the processes and that they made a poor decision at the time.

I urge every Australian not only to register as an organ donor but also to make sure that you and your family have solid, strong and lengthy conversations so that there is no doubt in your family that it is your intention to donate and that there is no doubt in your mind that other members of your family will in fact to donate your organs.

As I said, Australia has 1.1 million people registered but our donor rate is much lower than in many other countries. On a scale of like countries, we rank 19th out of 21 for the number per million who become organ donors. For example, in Spain I understand it is 34 per million; in Australia it is nine per million. We are equal 19th with New Zealand, which has the same rate. It is quite galling to be equal to New Zealand in anything. Only Greece has a lower rate than ours. I think we have all been touched in recent times by the story out of Greece about the young Australian man who unfortunately lost his life on an island and his family made the very heart-wrenching decision to allow his organs to be used to assist people in Greece. That is quite a wonderful story. It showed a great deal of courage and compassion by the parents of the boy who had unfortunately been killed over there in Greece.

While we have a low number of donors per million of population, we have a higher utilisation rate. At 3.5 donations per donor on average, we are getting towards the top end of the utilisation that is able to be made. Our systems are very good in performing the medical procedures necessary. The survival rates are wonderful. If I were requiring a transplant of any kind, knowing that I had an 85 per cent chance of living another five years or more I would be fairly keen to take that risk, particularly when, as we say, transplants occur at end-stage failure of organs. So there is not a great deal of life left for you to look at.

Although I did not want to take a lot of time this evening, I have in fact taken more than I anticipated. Again, I thank the opposition for their bipartisan approach to this very important government initiative. I appeal again not only to my constituents but also to the people of Australia to think about becoming an organ donor. Make sure you have those conversations with your family so that there is no risk that your organs will not be used should the occasion to do so arise.

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