Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In this week of reconciliation we focus on the disadvantages continuing for Indigenous communities throughout our country, whether they be in urban capitals like Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane or Perth; whether they are in regional centres like mine, Shepparton and Echuca; or whether indeed they are in some of the remotest communities you will find anywhere in the world, places like Areyonga and Haasts Bluff. In those communities we are deeply concerned that one of the scourges that are now well and truly entrenched is the problem of high-risk consumption of alcohol. I am not suggesting for a moment that Aboriginal people only have problems with drinking, that they do not drink at levels which cause absolutely no harm, which in fact contribute to their enjoyment of life and wellbeing. But the fact is that, although many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are teetotallers, those who do drink tend to drink at much higher rates of risk and harm than non-Indigenous Australians.

On Friday of this week we are going to take the Standing Committee for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs inquiry into the harmful impacts of alcohol use to the heartland of Melbourne. We have some excellent contributors to give evidence to this inquiry, which amongst the terms of reference includes the social and economic determinants of high-risk drinking; some of the strategies that have been tried to overcome the problems to give Indigenous high-risk drinkers a chance to break their addictions and to get back to a normal life; the trends in this business of what appears to be increasing harmful uses of alcohol; and international comparisons to see if other countries, particularly countries like ours—Canada, the United States and New Zealand—have come up with better strategies, strategies that have real impacts on the human communities.

Also, we want to investigate very carefully what the cost of alcohol and access to alcohol do in terms of high-risk drinking. Then with the special support of our Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Senator Nigel Scullion, we are including special references to foetal alcohol spectrum disorder problems. FASD, as it is more commonly called, is not just terrible brain damage afflicting Indigenous communities where mothers have been drinking during their pregnancy—of course that is not the case. FASD, at times also called FAS—foetal alcohol spectrum—is a scourge, a word I use deliberately, which in some cases is endemic across our Australian communities, particular as young girls join their male partners in binge drinking episodes, often over a weekend. They may have become pregnant and, with a mixture of drink and drugs, often do not seek any support for their pregnancy for several months. Indeed, they may not even be diagnosed as pregnant. By the time they are aware that they are in their second or third month of pregnancy, damage has been done to the foetus and the child is born with brain damage or with physical disabilities, depending on when the mother was drinking and what quantities.

It is irreversible harm. The child is born irreversibly damaged and all you can hope for is, if the child is diagnosed young enough, that some special care and strategies will ease that child's life. But too often in Australia, where we have no diagnostic clinics at all for foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, these children go undiagnosed. They move into the school system where they immediately become a problem, given they have serious learning difficulties. Their memory capacity is impaired. They have great difficulty in controlling their inhibitions, including their libido. As children reach puberty, girls have serious problems being preyed upon or there are other difficulties if they are boys. It is not long at all before most of them end up, particularly the boys, in contact with police and in jail. This is a problem right across Australia which our magistrates, our judges, our police and our social workers understand only too well.

We still do not have a corrections systems geared up to provide diversionary treatments or support for people who are brain damaged and are unable to be rehabilitated, whose reoffending when they are released is virtually guaranteed. We had a recent tragic case where a young woman was incarcerated indefinitely in Western Australian with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. She had had a life of shocking deprivation and was a victim of so much violence herself and, because there was no other place for her protection, was being kept in custody in Western Australia. The expectation was that she may have been relocated closer to her home community in Alice Springs. That was a work in progress last time I looked.

We have this prolific problem in Australia of high-risk drinking. It was highlighted in the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into FASD. The report, called The hidden harm, was released in November 2012—that is, heading towards two years ago. The reference came jointly from the Minister for Health and Ageing at the time and the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The series of recommendations which came out of that inquiry led to an Australian government action plan to reduce the impact of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder being announced for 2013-14 through to 2016-17. Some $20 million over four years were to be committed to this action plan. Unfortunately, as was the way with Labor, we had a lot of commitment and not much cash underpinning the commitments that were made. So it has fallen to this government, the coalition government, to find that $20 million, or as close as possible to that amount, to get the work under way.

The original response of the previous government was an action plan which was to have further development through consultation with key stakeholders and agencies. In one of our key recommendations, we wanted a panel of experts to be brought together to advise government on exactly what was needed, whether it was the Australian medical diagnostic tool to be completed; whether it was the multidisciplinary diagnostic centres to be set up to make sure that these babies and young children were diagnosed as soon as possible so that some interventions or therapeutic strategy could be put in place; or whether the advice was about what we should do to prevent another child being born in Australia with this irreparable brain damage, which is 100 per cent preventable if the mother does not drink a drop when she is pregnant.

It is no surprise that we have the recommendation from the 2009 National Health and Medical Research Council statement. Their recommendation is for zero alcohol consumption for women who are planning a pregnancy, who are pregnant or who are breastfeeding. Tragically, that is one of the best-kept secrets from the National Health and Medical Research Council's listings of recommendations. We still have a significant proportion of women who drink while pregnant. We have a significant proportion of medical practitioners who do not advise the women presenting to them asking for pregnancy tests or knowing that they are pregnant about the dangers of drinking alcohol while pregnant. We still have maternity hospitals, particularly private ones, which advertise the wine list in their maternity wings and how wonderful it is that, if women come to that particular hospital, they can have the very best of the reds and whites on offer. We have, of course, denial, often from young female journalists in the media, saying: 'It's not really true. I drank like a fish, or my mother did, and, look, my children are little Einsteins.' Tragically, there is too much research evidence from around the globe that foetal alcohol spectrum disorder is sapping the potential of children in ways that we have never seen before in the history of human development.

The one study that has been undertaken in Australia, the first comprehensive multidisciplinary team assessment of the incidence of FASD in an Australian community, has found that we have in that community the highest rates of FASD in children under eight in the world. This is horrific. How can it be the case? And yet we still do not have a national alcohol strategy or a national foetal alcohol spectrum disorder strategy which is making sure that every man and woman, every male and female—this is not just the woman's business—and every family in Australia is aware that, if they wish to protect the potential of their newborn, if they wish to protect the brain of their newborn, they simply do not drink alcohol for nine months. I would not have thought that was a very big ask to protect the child; all of their future opportunities; their capacity to learn, to grow, to get a job and to stay out of prison; and their capacity not to be bullied, misunderstood or called simply 'naughty' because they cannot take instruction. All of those are problems that our FAS, or FASD, children experience, and we are still very much turning a blind eye to them.

I am hoping that in my community of Shepparton, in northern Victoria, where we have a serious problem of binge drinking amongst our young men and women, we will have a multidisciplinary diagnostic clinic established sometime soon. We have a specialist in our community who is now taking his work into our schools, where teachers are in despair—and that is not just in regional Victoria but in places like Tennant Creek and Darwin and right throughout Australia. They are in despair about these little children in their classroom who have very limited capacity to learn. They have no aid funding or special support in trying—as they described it in Tennant Creek—to just keep these kids in the classroom.

One of the tragedies of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FAS, is that it is not inheritable—it is not a condition passed from mother to child genetically—but, too often, women who suffer from FASD themselves give birth to children who are in turn brain damaged from this condition because they typically are heavy drinkers and drug takers themselves. There is very little support for any women whether they have FAS or FASD, or anyone else in our community. If they have an addiction to alcohol, there is very little support for them when they are pregnant to reduce drastically their alcohol consumption or to cut out their drinking altogether.

One of the pillars of the action plan that was identified in 2013-14—and this plan was to go on to 2016-17—was the fact that we must have targeted measures supporting prevention and management of FASD, which would include targeting women with alcohol dependency. There was to be $4.8 million for that but, as I said, the promise was there but not the cash. There was an understanding that the action plan would have to promote consistent messages through primary care providers about the risk of consuming alcohol during pregnancy using the Medicare Local network and that they had to promote and embed awareness of the risk of FASD.

Again, in Australia we have this extraordinary situation where we allow alcohol companies to advertise in prime children's' viewing time through the sponsorship of sport. We do not have labelling on alcohol mandated, which is extraordinary given the efforts we made with tobacco. As a cost to the Australian community, tobacco has far less impact than alcohol consumption in terms of violence, premature death, a whole range of diseases and, of course, the brain damage done to the unborn. So why is it that we are out there on tobacco as an addiction and as a horrific health problem for Australians but we are pretty much silent when it comes to the impact of alcohol on our human communities? We seem to have so much bravado associated with how much can you drink. Can you remember your party? If you can, it was not a great party. Or let us celebrate you are pregnant with a bottle of bubbly or let's celebrate you winning anything with some alcohol, and, if you are not smashed, you do not have many friends. We have this unfortunate culture in Australia that has taken drinking to excess as some mark of manhood and, increasingly, a mark of you being a good-time girl as well.

Let's get grownup about alcohol consumption in Australia. I am not a wowser myself. Let's drink wine, beer and spirits in moderation and sensibly, but let's not touch a drop if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Let's make sure our Indigenous communities, who are most severely affected by high-risk drinking, do not have a whole generation written off in a form of cultural genocide because their children are brain damaged irreparably when every baby's birth with that damage is preventable.

In this week of reconciliation, I beg our collective effort from both sides of parliament to focus on this issue. I am disappointed the Victorian government chose on Friday not to make any submission at all to this alcohol inquiry. I think that is a disappointment. (Time expired)

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