Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Part of the essence of humanity is our drive to alleviate the suffering of others. It is something that we seek to do as representatives in parliament, and it is a natural instinct in the everyday lives of most people. Australians are renowned for their generosity and their readiness to help others in distress.

Before going into the substance of my speech, let me clear one little thing from my mind. I am governed by two overriding principles when it comes to foreign aid and the elimination of disease. First, I cannot abide those people who peddle the glib old mantra that charity begins at home. Charity does not begin at home; charity begins when you look into the eyes of a sick or starving child. Second, anyone who believes that we have eliminated smallpox, have almost eliminated polio, can eliminate AIDS—as the previous speaker said—or can eliminate malaria and tuberculosis by somehow cocooning Australia from the rest of the world and trying to escape our obvious interdependent responsibility lives in a fool’s paradise. As a nation we have an obligation to help foreign countries which desperately need our expertise, our manpower and—yes—our money to overcome the difficult challenges they face. I also believe that any Australian government, regardless of its colour, has the duty to ensure that our foreign aid budget and other allocations in the development assistance fields deliver the greatest good for the greatest number of people affected.

Foreign aid has to be targeted at projects which empower Third World countries. There is no question that disease eradication, particularly amongst our neighbouring countries, is one of the best purposes our foreign aid can be put to. As someone who has a firsthand understanding of the importance of the fight against devastating diseases such as HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, I am happy to speak in support of the motion of the honourable member for Braddon on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. At this time last year I was one of the parliamentary advisers to the Australian Embassy at the UN. I am familiar with the great work being done around the world in fighting these awful, debilitating diseases through the Global Fund and more widely through the Millennium Fund.

One of the greatest efforts to overcome these diseases has been carried out through the Global Fund to Fight AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It was created in 2002. It is a unique partnership between governments, the private sector and international communities to combat three of the most insidious diseases still plaguing the planet. The Global Fund is currently the main source of finance to help fight these diseases throughout the world, providing a quarter of all the international financing required to combat AIDS, two-thirds of tuberculosis outlays and three-quarters of malaria treatment programs.

Since its inception, it is estimated that the work done through the fund has saved around five million lives in some of the poorest countries on earth. In the same time frame, the fund distributed around $10 billion to help control the spread of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and invested more than $90 billion in specific control and treatment programs. These programs are saving around 3,600 lives every day and preventing thousands of new infections from breaking out.

Australia committed $145 million to the fund for 2008 to 2010, and last month the government confirmed it would contribute again, pledging $210 million to the fund between 2011 and 2013. Some Australians might question the value of foreign aid, but in many cases we reap the benefits of the work we are doing in funding other nations, even in our own nation. As I said, the global fund is responsible for the control and treatment of HIV-AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis through South-East Asia and the Pacific, covering 24 countries in our region, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Tonga, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands. It is important to recognise that malaria is a global issue; and, in the case of controlling the spread of malaria, the benefits to our region are self-evident. Many of the 60 per cent of malaria cases occurring outside Africa occur in the Asia-Pacific region, so this is not some remote disease in an even more remote country; this is something right on our doorstep. Ask the diggers who served in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands in World War II. Ask the contractors who work or have worked recently in Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. Many of them have been struck down by malaria. It is a disease which has a serious economic as well as a human impact on poorer countries. It fuels a cycle of poverty, primarily afflicting the poor, who tend to live in malaria prone areas in poorly built dwellings that offer few if any barriers against mosquitoes.

During my time at the UN, I spoke about Australia’s leading role in combating malaria in the Asia-Pacific region. Around one-quarter of the nations that have embarked on malaria elimination programs are located in the Asia-Pacific region, and through the Pacific Malaria Initiative we are providing targeted technical and management support to governments to implement their national malaria control plans. This initiative is already making significant headway. For instance, in the Solomon Islands, the malaria incidence rate was brought down from 199 cases per 1,000 in 2003 to 82 cases per 1,000 in 2008, while in Vanuatu the rate has decreased from 74 cases per 1,000 in 2003 to 14 cases per 1,000 in 2008. Australia also hosted the inaugural meeting of the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network early last year. The network is another forum to help improve the technologies, skills, systems and leadership that are needed to decrease and eventually eliminate malaria in the Asia-Pacific region.

A little closer to home, we recently heard about the dreadful outbreak of cholera in Papua New Guinea. But what most Australians do not know is that malaria is actually one of the leading causes of death and illness in Papua New Guinea. The global fund has invested around $70 million in malaria treatment and eradication programs in Papua New Guinea. Because of our proximity to PNG, this is relevant to us. Alongside this, Indonesia currently ranks third in the world for its overall tuberculosis burden. Because of our proximity to these two nations, we are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of both malaria and tuberculosis in Northern Australia.

Recognising this, the coalition pledged $40 million during the recent election campaign to help establish a tropical health institute at James Cook University upon winning government. The money would have gone towards the construction of an Australian institute of tropical health and medicine which would focus on bacteriology and biomolecular sciences, urology and pharmaceutical chemistry. Older Australians would remember the famous Sir Raphael Cilento, a doctor from Queensland who was a world leader in tropical medicine in the 1950s. We need to repeat those sorts of things in the current age. In a nutshell, such work would advance us tremendously in the elimination of many of these scourges that the world suffers.

Those of us who lived in the 1950s and 1960s would remember having the skin tests and going along to the mobile X-ray clinics. That way Australia eliminated tuberculosis. It had a tri-fold effect of detection, treatment and elimination and the end of a potential infection. We should not expect that we who got through that so lightly should not do something to help our neighbours through a similar crisis. And so I support the honourable member’s motion.

See this speech in context