Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The very nature of being human is that we are finite, and one of the consequences of that is that we do suffer from illness and only have a limited time here on earth. But if there is one thing through which the human race has enhanced itself and expanded its life opportunities, it is medical research; it has been as a result of learning from great scientists, great researchers. Many of those researchers do so because of a belief in how they are contributing to humanity not because of money that they get from doing the research.

I think back to Australia's contribution to medical research. We are but a small population of 21 million people in a massive world of, I believe, seven billion people. There have been many great things that Australians have done because Australians, by their very nature, are innovative. There used to be a saying: 'Give an Australian a piece of fencing wire and they can fix anything', and that is good. I think about the great discovery of penicillin. We take it for granted that we can actually sew up the wound and then provide penicillin so that that person can recover. There are things that people would have traditionally died from had it not been for the Australian who discovered penicillin. We simply would not have seen people live who would otherwise have died. There is also the bionic ear, and burns specialists where we have seen great doctors who have worked on burns, and there is also the recent announcement about melanoma treatment.

We do need a fund. We do need to give some surety to those who are considering research in Australia that there is hypothecated money set aside. It is true that bipartisanship exists in this parliament to put money out of every year's budget into research. No-one is talking about that going away. The attraction of having a fund affords us the opportunity to be able to say with real legitimacy to a researcher, 'You can continue your research in Australia. You can continue to expand something that you think might be on the cusp of discovery, and you can develop it here'. So many times one of the great criticisms of Australian research in many fields of science, in many fields of technology, is that we have not had the mechanism to keep that research in Australia, and we have seen that research go offshore. That is sometimes okay. It is okay if the research goes offshore and still benefits the human race. But it wouldn't it be nice to see that the ingenuity of Australians is well rewarded and that there is surety for them to stay here and invest through medical research because we have a hypothecated fund that will be as much as $20 billion which we can put aside to assist medical research.

In my electorate one of the things that is raised with me is Parkinson's. There is no cure for Parkinson's. We have a Parkinson's support nurse and we have a very active Parkinson's group, but there is no cure for it. Multiple sclerosis is another insidious disease where people can have a fast or slow deterioration, and we still do not know how we can minimise that. Type 1 diabetes of our children has been raised with me several times and how much type 1 diabetes impacts a family when a young child gets it. There is a diabetes support group in Birchip, a little country town, and the people are really muscled together and stand by one another to support one another through that disease. If we could have more research perhaps, just perhaps, we can minimise the effect on those families and on those young children.

We have come a long way. I remember doing biology in year 12 back in 1993—I am showing my age—and we watched a video on open heart surgery, bypass surgery. I remember thinking that it was incredible. Here was the bypass surgery, which was very much in the early days, and expectancy of life and survivability after that was a little bit rare. Now, when I look at my family, I have a dad who has what he calls the 'zipper' on his chest, and he has had a three-way bypass. Now they just wheel them in, and the surgery adds years and years of productive capacity and years and years of life expectancy. We have come so far.

We can argue every day about how we fund the research, and there were some suggestions in the previous budget that were unpopular with the Australian people, and we have removed those suggestions. That is what a government does if a government listens. The most important thing is that we do believe that the health of Australians is important. I think everyone in this parliament from both sides believe that. We do believe that medical research and those researchers who conduct that research do it out of a sense of passion not out of a sense of financial reward. We do believe that we need to stand by them and create an incentive to attract that research into Australia.

I was really proud to see a Medical Research Future Fund being announced by our side whilst we are in government. In many years to come, when we are retired from the parliament and are back in the workforce or back into whatever we do, we will look back and say this is something we were proud that we set up and that it will reap long-term yields and benefits for the Australian people. Those who spoke about some of the concerns about the fund will say, 'Well, on balance, it actually was a good reform'. So this is a really good thing for the Australian people. I am proud to be able to speak on it this morning, and I commend the parliament for bringing this up and look forward to the health benefits that will come out of this fund.

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