David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before I speak on the Medical Research Future Fund Bill 2015 and the Medical Research Future Fund (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2015, I just cannot let a few of the earlier comments go through to the keeper. Allusions to Yes Minister machinations—not funding medical research because people currently ill are missing out on medication—is such a misconstruction of what is essentially a great innovation. Also, to call the Medical Research Future Fund a potential pork-barrelling fund is really quite offensive. It is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. If the truth be known, the Health and Hospitals Fund, which was treated as a capital works budget—and some may allege that there was pork-barrelling in that—was actually set up as an endowment fund by the Howard government. It was rolled over and given a new name. Instead of acting as an endowment fund should and delivering projects out of the dividends, the capital was chewed up extensively. This is exactly what we are trying not to do with the Medical Research Future Fund.

This will be an endowment fund. For those who do not understand what that means—and there are some people even in the other house who appear not to have understood this when the legislation first came up—an endowment fund delivers dividends, and it is the dividends that will fund the medical research and innovations so that there is something there in perpetuity. Long after any one minister, parliamentarian or Prime Minister has come and gone, it will be there in perpetuity, like many of the other great endowment funds that fund research around the world. It will be created by funds from the Health and Hospitals Fund being rolled over into the Medical Research Future Fund, and it will be able to be distributed to a range of entities, including universities, not-for-profit research bodies, Commonwealth bodies such as the CSIRO, state research facilities, individuals and corporate entities. There are many research and innovative bodies around the country that will be able to access these funds.

In 2015-16, because there is potentially only a small amount going into the fund, it will take a long time to grow the fund up to its eventual level of $20 billion. We have not put a time frame on it because a lot of the initiatives and efficiencies that will drive savings will remain in the health system and fund research. If we were to follow the previous speaker in criticising medical research—if we had followed that advice for the last 30 or 40 years—we would still be using leeches, humours and cupping. Medical research has got us to where we are now.

There are a range of appropriation mechanisms. The fund will utilise the Future Fund's financial management skills, but the costs to the Future Fund will be appropriated on a pro rata basis. This will not be subsidising other functions of the Commonwealth government's Future Fund. The intention is that it will have an advisory board of up to eight eminent people with particular skills in innovation, research and policy—all the skills that you would need for appropriate governance of such a fund. It will provide strategic advice and direction, but the actual nuts and bolts of the research covers a whole span of possibilities: laboratory research, clinical trials, research scholarships and fellowships, commercialisation of new innovations and drugs, translational research, and investment in research infrastructure and facilities. It will utilise the NHMRC, which has enormous skills that have been developed over many decades in assessing individual research projects. It would be crazy not to utilise its skills, so the intention is to do so.

It is a separate fund to the medical research endowment account as the Medical Research Future Fund and the NHMRC are destined to be separate bodies. So let me reassure you if you are in any of the august, well-established and world-renowned research institutions in Australia like the Hunter Medical Research Institute just down the road from my electorate. In my own electorate, much clinical research goes on at the North Coast Cancer Institute, directed by august physicians such as Stephen Begbie over many years. Be reassured if you are at the Queensland medical research institute or other bodies in Brisbane, at the Garvan Institute or the Millennium in Sydney, at the Children's Medical Research Institute, the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, Flinders University or Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research—the list goes on and on. Our great research universities have many research capabilities. Be reassured if you have interest in oncology and cancers, heart disease, vascular disease or diabetes, like the work being done by the Baker IDI institute on vascular disease and diabetes—very common diseases. All the advances that come out of research will have material benefit for generations to come. It is a constant process that has to be continued around the world, and Australia really fights above its weight. Be reassured if your research is in kidney disease, neuro-degenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, or genetics. There are so many fields of endeavour in medical research because there is such a plethora of illnesses that afflict the human condition. We have a great record of achievement in bionic ears, the colony-stimulating factors that are used in leukaemia treatment and kidney disease, sleep apnoea, foetal ultrasound, SIDS and spina bifida. The list just goes on—there are too many for me to mention—but this fund will create great a base for the medical research body in Australia.

Once the fund gets to $20 billion—I do not know how quickly it will get there—a five per cent return on that would be $1 billion a year. There are great innovators in medical research and in medical industries in Australia. Currently, we only allocate 0.75 per cent of our GDP towards medical research. If you compare us to our OECD partners like those in North America and Europe, we are contributing only 64 per cent of what they are putting in. So this will fill the gap and we will punch above our size and weight. For every dollar spent on research, it has been estimated that you get a health benefit of $2.17. For the 23,000 existing researchers around the country and the 40,000 people employed by the medicines industry, and for the millions of citizens of Australia and the world, I commend this bill to the House.

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