Brett Raguse (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the Australian National Preventive Health Agency Bill 2009. This bill establishes the Australian National Preventative Health Agency, the ANPHA, to tackle the challenges of preventing chronic disease. The ANPHA is planned to support the Australian Health Ministers’ Conference and the Council of Australian Governments, COAG, in preventing chronic disease. Many of the chronic diseases common in our society can often be prevented. Prevention makes sense. As a society, we want our friends and family to live long and productive lives—free from unnecessary suffering—and as taxpayers we do not want unnecessary costs imposed on our expensive health systems if they can be otherwise avoided.

Through the National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health, the Rudd government is putting $872 million over six years into initiatives targeting chronic disease. These initiatives include programs focusing on poor nutrition, physical activity, smoking and alcohol. There will be social marketing aimed at obesity and tobacco, and infrastructure to support these interventions. When the last two speakers were discussing their issues about this bill and mentioned obesity they looked long and hard at me, so I was a bit concerned! Maybe we all have to take a little bit of care in terms of our own preventative health measures.

Other measures proposed in the bill amount to $133 million over four years. This is comprised of four main components: $17.6 million for the creation and ongoing costs of ANPHA; $102 million for a national campaign targeting the important preventative health issues of obesity and smoking; $13.1 million towards a preventative health research fund; and $500,000 to auspice current preventative health arrangements to address gaps and avoid duplication.

I would like to particularly note the importance of funding for preventative health research. Despite the knowledge of lifestyle choices and their health consequences, many people still make poor choices—including smoking, drinking excessively and consuming a poor diet. These are problems broadly acknowledged by governments of all notions but are challenging to resolve. While many of us speculate on the best messages to put forward and the various carrot-and-stick approaches, there is no perfect solution. Research is therefore important for us to determine and deliver the best approaches for preventative health. We need to be able to review and conduct research to support the best possible policy development.

The ANPHA will complement our strong health treatment systems. In my electorate of Forde, the Logan Hospital, which is a major regional hospital, is facing increasing pressure from population growth in Logan and the northern Gold Coast regions. This makes investment in these vital services more important than ever. Logan Hospital recently received $44 million from the federal government to expand the emergency department. For this announcement, I was honoured to be joined locally by Minister Roxon, the Minister for Health and Ageing, by the Queensland Deputy Premier and Minister for Health, Paul Lucas. Health care and affordable health care is an issue of importance for the people of Forde.

Every day in my electorate the office deals with situations of individuals who are badly afflicted with preventable chronic diseases. It is a problem that not only negatively affects these people but has an economic impact as well, through reduced capacity to work. If not addressed, many individuals will end up incapacitated—on the Disability Support Pension—due to diseases that could have been prevented. Many people in this situation also experience depression and other mental illnesses, which is a reminder that preventative health must have both a physical and a mental component. To give some examples, both historic and current, we can look at vaccination—a very simple yet effective preventative health measure in Australia. Decisions on vaccination need to be based on solid science. Valid scientific work, research or ideas, amongst other characteristics, should be replicable. Any scientific tests or analyses must be able to be repeated by other experts in the field. They should also face a peer review process in which other experts in the field closely examine the work.

Unfortunately, what often passes as research in the popular media and on second-rate internet sites is not valid research. One of the results is that there remain popular movements that oppose vaccination in our society. Recently my office received large quantities of emails entitled ‘Stop mandatory swine flu vaccination’. The content is extraordinary in a number of ways. Not least is the fact that they refer to the tamiflu vaccine when tamiflu, oseltamivir, is not a vaccine but an antiviral drug. The vaccine history provided is an exercise in the selective reproduction of information that would even make most members of the House blush. This could be amusing if it was not being taken seriously and not about such a fundamentally serious issue. One random reported fact from the email—an interesting fact—states that:

In 1977, Dr Jonas Salk who developed the first polio vaccine, testified along with other scientists, that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases throughout the USA since 1961.

The vaccines for polio were developed by Jonas Salk in 1952 and Albert Sabin in 1954. In 1952 there were some 57,600 reported cases of polio in the US with over 3,145 deaths and 21,269 people left with a form of paralysis. The actual number of cases would have been far higher as most polio infections cause no symptoms at all. However, by the year 1961, there were only 161 cases that year in the US. There are now less polio cases in the entire world each year than there were US deaths in 1952. The misleading statement in the standard email suggests that, rather than preventing polio, the vaccine creates it. Yet the statistics speak for themselves. Polio levels, along with related paralysis and death levels, have collapsed around the world because of vaccination. The interesting thing is that we do know that vaccination is about an exposure to a threat, but certainly not in the terms suggested by this email—that is, all vaccinations are bad.

In the minds of most people, polio is not a threat. This is largely correct, if only due to effective immunisation programs. Worryingly, the lack of a visible threat appears to breed complacency. For some, the risk of something going wrong during immunisation becomes more real than the disease itself. It is important to remember that polio is real. There are many people in Australia who still suffer from the affects of polio today. There are people who were born before the mass immunisations in the late 1950s. It is not uncommon to be approached by wheelchair-bound constituents in Forde who are still suffering from the consequences of polio. This is not a virus that we want back in Australia and complacency about serious diseases must not take precedence over solid science.

Further to that, there are issues about hepatitis C—again, unknown some years ago—and the importance of research when we look at any medical application. I have personally been involved in the case of Mr Graham Crust, a constituent who suffers from hepatitis C, which is an infectious disease of the liver. Mr Crust appears to have been infected through a blood transfusion after a work accident in a time when very little information was known about the disease we now know as hep C. This was as late as the early 1980s. The conditions Mr Crust experiences from hep C are severe and impact on every aspect of his life. His conditions include macronodular cirrhosis, hypertension and gout. His capacity to work was substantially compromised and his condition poorly understood by the community.

Twenty five years after Mr Crust contracted hep C, we are fortunate to know a lot more about it. We know how people contract hep C, such as through sharing needles and through blood, and in the case of Mr Crust, through a blood transfusion that went horribly wrong. So people do have to endure this dreadful disease and, once again, research into areas like hep C and polio is important. That is why our legislation looks at preventative medicine and health and also the research that goes with it.

I have my own experiences with preventative health care. In fact, 25 years ago my father died very suddenly at home. It was quite surprising and, you know, the terrible situation that occurs around an untimely death. It took an autopsy to reveal what had actually happened to him. These severe consequences were caused by lifestyle choices. He was a man who was not necessarily overweight, but certain lifestyle choices, including smoking, were part of the problem. Unfortunately little was known then about the full contributing factors of smoking on cardiac health. It is something that we understand very well these days, but in those days smoking and smoking advertising were still very much a part of our everyday culture. Men in the 1980s were even less aware or motivated than they are today about prevention or lifestyle diseases. I can say that my own experience with my father’s untimely death was something that gave me a wakeup call in my early 20s about the sorts of decisions we need to make. I thought of myself as a well educated person, but I did not know the consequences of high cholesterol and all the other effects. Twenty-five years on, I am much more informed and so is the community.

That is a good example of prevention and preventative health. It is so important, and we heard the other speakers today talking not only about the need for an understanding of prevention, but also about the necessary research that should go with that. I am sure my story about unnecessary deaths due to a missing piece of information or a lack of understanding in our community at the time can be repeated tens of thousands of times in this country. In conclusion, preventative health is important for the wellbeing of the Australian people. This bill establishes the Australian National Preventative Health Agency, the ANPHA, which will coordinate actions tackling preventative health in cooperation with states and territories. Important programs will be delivered, including coordinating research and tackling obesity and smoking. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context