Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Petrie for moving this motion. I also congratulate the government for its interest in this area, in particular the 2008 legislation which established the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority. In my contribution to the debate on that legislation, I noted the difference organ donation made to people’s lives and how selfless were the people who had donated organs from loved ones to give the gift of life to others. I spoke about two friends. One, Peter, had died when he fell through a shearing shed roof. His widow donated every bit of Peter that she could give away—bones, eyes, kidneys—to give the opportunity for other people to have a good life. She has become a strident campaigner in our community, promoting the cause of organ and tissue donation. I also spoke of a woman that I know very well who has received a kidney. It has made such an enormous difference to her life, in fact, that she now works on dialysis helplines, helping people in that same position. These are very big events in people’s lives, even though they may seem to be remote from almost everybody who has not been faced with the issue of organ donation.

Australia has a proud history in medical science, with the bulk of our Nobel laureates, including William and Laurence Bragg, Howard Florey through to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, coming as a result of medical breakthroughs. This motion recognises that stem cells are the new frontier in medicine and offer possible solutions to many of the diseases and ailments which bedevil our society, which has managed to extend our life expectancy. We all want to live longer—and, on average, we do. That means that along the way many more things are likely to go wrong with us and we will fall victim to ailments that, perhaps, in previous times we may not have lived long enough to have experienced. We all, particularly in this job, are confronted every day with people who are facing quality of life issues, and I suggest that we may be debating some things about quality of life in the very near future.

Stem cell research has the potential to make a great contribution to people’s quality of life. I remember well the campaign by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in the lead-up to the last election. They visited virtually every member of parliament lobbying for the establishment of a clinical trial base, and in the lead-up to the election the coalition committed $35 million for the establishment of those clinical trials for juvenile diabetes. I am disappointed to say up to this stage it has still not been matched by the government. Not only would those clinical trials address juvenile diabetes; they would also enable a network to be set up for trials on a broader base for many of the advances that are going to happen in stem cell research. Once this clinical base is set up it will be able to be used by many others in the industry—and, of course, in stem cell research this is exactly what they need. Researchers need a database to help with their understanding of the life and medical history of the individuals in the trial from start to finish. I hope that the government comes round to supporting that trial in the near future.

What is even more disappointing is that the government has also chosen not to renew support for the Australian Stem Cell Centre. Funding will cease in mid-2011. While Professor Richard Boyd, from the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, has welcomed the new funding committed in the area by the federal government, he notes that the overall reduction in funding will restrain researchers and tempt them to go offshore. In fact, the Australian Stem Cell Centre chairman, Professor Doug Macdonald, has said that the new funding is only about half the $8 million the centre will achieve in its spending program in its last two years leading up to 2011.

The Australian Stem Cell Centre was funded over nine years and so one must divide the total funding of $98.55 million by the nine years to get an approximate annual figure. Although this figure was not necessarily equalised in every year in this way, this would give average annualised funding of $10.95 million. The NHMRC has received additional five-year funding of $2½ million and that works out to about half a million dollars a year. So the new funding announced by Minister Carr is around about $3 million per year, thus making the total earmarked for stem cell research around about $3½ million a year. That is considerably less than the current commitment.

To come back to some of the diseases we may possibly be able to treat with advances in stem cell research, in the last parliament I was privileged to be part of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation. In February this year we received a briefing from Professor Richard Boyd, from the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories. He talked about some of the things it might be possible to address with stem cell treatment in the future, such as MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s disease, motor neurone disease and acquired afflictions like stroke and spinal cord and brain injuries. The costs to individuals of these various diseases, ailments and injuries is absolutely enormous and, as you would know through your work in your electorate, Madam Deputy Speaker, you deal with people afflicted in this way on a regular basis. We all become involved, in a personal sense, in their lives in some way. I think of all those I know struggling every day with Parkinson’s and MS, and anything that we can possibly do in this place to achieve some kind of benefit in their life—and perhaps, for those in the future, complete cure—we should do.

I was pretty excited by the prospects that were outlined in this briefing we received, but I was taken aback to hear that there was a three per cent annual increase in the incidence of diseases like asthma and type 1 diabetes. I pricked up my ears at this and made a remark along the lines that I thought type 1 diabetes was a hereditary disease, or that at least it was inflicted normally at a young age. In comparison with type 2 diabetes, which is endemic. Professor Boyd replied that there were quite a few diseases in that category, asthma and peanut allergies being two that were increasing on an annualised rate. When asked why this was the case, he explained that they thought it may be because people are now living in an antiseptic environment where things are oversterilised—that we are taking too much care of the food we eat. So perhaps our kids do not eat enough dirt! I said, ‘So you mean the woman in the tuckshop who has got one glove on is actually killing us?’ In a roundabout way of speaking, that is what is happening. I know that is a bit of an aside to the subject we are debating today, but I found it to be a very interesting point that we are actually increasing our ailments. In fact, in our modern society we legislate as to how our food should be handled and contribute to the problem. The highest rates of type 2 diabetes in Australia are in remote Indigenous communities. The lowest rates of type 1diabetes type are also in remote Indigenous communities, where cleanliness is not set at such a high level. Their immune systems are challenged at a younger age and thus grow with the person. There are probably some lessons in that for all of us.

So I do recognise the government’s support for the National Cord Blood Collection Network and the intent of this motion. The possibilities are almost endless, and as the cord blood bank grows we will be able to match donors much better than we can at the moment. We need a national base to achieve these results. It is very encouraging not just for those with long-term incapacity but, probably more importantly, for those who are yet to face those challenges.

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