Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure and an honour to speak on the motion on Australian Hearing Awareness Week. I need to inform everyone that my attempts to raise this motion in the Federation Chamber were unsuccessful. I was rebuked, and I apologise for being five minutes late.

Hearing is something that we must be mindful of. There have been many famous and prominent Australians who have suffered with hearing loss. Much of it is due to cumulative exposure, as we know. I want to say to the member for Richmond that I think they were relatively ill-informed comments to be highly critical of the role of the private sector in hearing. Like dentistry, the private sector plays a very important role. It only betrays that the member for Richmond has never walked into a private hearing provider when she talked about the quality that they deliver. The quality is exceptional and no independent and fair-minded person would say otherwise.

The member for Richmond did raise a significant point about the community service obligation if one were to ultimately dispose of the assets of Australian Hearing to potentially private sector buyers. The big concern really would be if it were purchased by a major multinational that was basically the provider and vendor of just one hearing aid line of products. That would be a concern. Not all private providers do that and there is a chance to energise the sector by having Australian Hearing in hands other than those of the government.

Let us now focus on 23 August. I know that the notion of Hearing Awareness Week has been used as a Trojan Horse to have a red-hot crack at the private sector, which Labor has tried to do today, but I reassure all of those Australians who quietly walk into a private hearing provider that yes, the quality of care is just the same as at Australian Hearing, which is government owned, and no, the sky will not fall in, the private providers will not rip you off and penalty rates will not be affected if you see a private hearing provider—they will look after you; you are in great hands. Our health system, much as Labor tries to deny it, is built on the back of private provision, and having a blended private-public model is actually what makes it so strong—something that Labor has never understood and has fought against since the mid-1970s.

Hearing can be lost with both relatively acute and seriously severe events. Examples of those are military service and exposure to sustained levels of high-volume music in nightclubs. I mention those two because we need to be aware the risks facing not only veterans, farmers and those who work in industry but also those who have high levels of recreational noise exposure. They are both very important. Awareness is important. The propensity to throw on some ear protection is sometimes seen as being weak and not being able to handle it. Farmers in particular say that they have done it forever and they do not see the problem. We need to have those really clear discussions about the importance of looking after your hearing.

I will go through some examples. Once you start exceeding 110 decibels, which is similar to a gunshot or to a jet taking off, you can only stand around one minute of that kind of exposure before you start seeing damage to the inner ear. At the other end of the equation at about 65 decibels, which is probably a really noisy household appliance, you are unlikely to see too much damage until you have had more than one hour of exposure.

Importantly, once children lose their hearing it is almost impossible to bring it back without great expense. It is important to note that many of the hearing aids that are available to children are removed once they turn 18 because the public access program terminates. The problem there is that people are given at the last gasp before they turn 18 the best possible hearing aids and then basically they are left with that device for however long it lasts. It is clearly iniquitous. I agree we need to look after kids but we also need to find a smoother way of looking after people who have severe needs but happen to be 18 years and one day old.

The incidence of hearing loss of course increases just with age. We know that half the population between 60 and 70 are affected and that rises to 80 per cent once you get to 70. We are already doing everything we can to help veterans, and no-one on either side of the parliamentary fence would question that. Most importantly, I think an excellent message to leave with is that, if there is one group that is not fully aware of their exposure, it is young people, particularly with recreational exposure in nightclubs and loud music concerts. We do need to say to them that it is completely okay to wear hearing protection in those circumstances because that exposure is causing a wide degree of chronic but low-level damage that will ultimately be a large bill for this nation.

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