Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I endorse the comments made by the member for Port Adelaide. We are currently looking at a range of areas where the current government appears to be taking out the process where we have independent peer review and assessment.

I would just like to ask the minister a question: where do you see the work that is being done on data linkage between the Commonwealth and the state going with this medical research fund? It is absolutely critical that we have in place a mechanism that enables the PBS and the Medicare data to be linked, with anonymous identifiers, to the hospital records. Without the ability to bring the Commonwealth and state datasets together, we are actually going to be losing the raw material from of much of this medical research.

I want to take this opportunity to ask the minister: has she been dealing with this issue? There was a brief period where we did have linkage and we had extraordinary results emerging. Since then, we had a pull-back by the Commonwealth. I understand the Commonwealth has now made some slight forays, and they have said that for short-term projects they would allow this data linkage. But, if we are serious about medical research, we do need to get both sets of data together in order to have insight into illness and wellbeing in Australia. Minister, can you shed some light on this?

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