Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to support this motion. I congratulate the member for Calwell for bringing this motion before the House. The statistic that shocked me most when I was looking into strokes was the fact that one in six people in their lifetime will suffer a stroke. One in six—that is someone's sister, brother, wife, husband, son, daughter or even us. When you look at any group of 100 Australians, to think that one in six would suffer a stroke is shocking.

We know the numbers. In 2015 there were 50,000 new and recurrent strokes. That works out to be 1,000 for every week or one every 10 minutes. This debate goes for half an hour. In that half an hour there will probably be three strokes around our country. In 2012, nearly 130,000 or 30 per cent of stroke survivors were under the age of 65. It is not just the elderly; it is across many age spectrums.

We know that stroke kills more women than breast cancer and more men that prostate cancer. We know there are currently about 440,000 Australians living with the side effects of stroke, and by 2032 that is predicted to reach over 700,000. Sixty-five percent of those living with a stroke suffer a disability that impedes their ability to carry out their daily living activities unassisted.

Then there is the cost of strokes to the economy. In 2012 that cost was estimated to be $5 billion. There is an estimated $94.3 billion burden of disease costs for strokes, which is comparable to the $41 billion burden of disease costs that Deloitte Access Economics estimated for anxiety and depression.

Strokes do affect many people. I have experienced it in my family. A few years ago my father suffered a stroke. I came to pick him up from his house. As you do when you are very close, you often look at each other and you don't even have to say words to each other. We jumped in the car. We turned the radio on and listened to the radio. We were driving off and all of a sudden I mentioned something to him about one of the topics that was on the radio. He spoke back and I knew immediately that his voice was that of a little child. He had suffered the drooping of the mouth. He had suffered the classic symptoms of a stroke. We were already in the car, so I did not know whether it was best to pull over to the side of the road and call an ambulance or to keep going to the Campbelltown Hospital, which was about five or 10 minutes away. I elected to keep driving. I dropped him off in the emergency section at Campbelltown Hospital.

I would like to say what wonderful work the staff did there in admitting him quickly, recognising the symptoms and getting him straight in to some treatment. But the difficulty we had was that we were unable to ascertain when the stroke had actually occurred. We did not know whether the stroke had occurred a minute before he hopped in the car, an hour before he hopped in the car or sometime the previous night, and that, of course, affected the treatments. It is important when we see these numbers that are affecting our society.

We know that, the quicker someone can get to hospital, the greater chance they have of having the effects minimised. The FAST program which the National Stroke Foundation does is:

Face Check their face. Has their mouth drooped?

Arms Can they lift both arms?

Speech Is their speech slurred? Do they understand you?

Time Is critical.

Something like this—the costs to the individual citizen and the cost to our society—also shows why we have to keep on growing the economy, why we have to keep allowing the private sector to increase wealth in this economy, and why we have to manage it well, because we need to put more research dollars into treating stroke, we need to put more into rehabilitation or treatments, and we need to put more resources into prevention. But that is why our job here is to make sure we spend every dollar wisely, to grow that economy, so that we can put more into things that really count. I thank the House.

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