Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to second this motion and I thank the member for Leichhardt for moving it. I also congratulate him on his excellent work and passion for working in this area of eradicating tuberculosis. Last Friday was World Tuberculosis Day: 24 March each year represents the day on which Robert Koch in 1882 discovered the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. Since that discovery there have been numerous attempts at a cure. Mr Koch's discovery was very important for the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. World TB Day should be the day that we discover a cure for tuberculosis—the day we eradicate this terrible disease—but it is not. The reason is that we do not have a cure for tuberculosis; we do not have a workable vaccine. A vaccine was developed a century ago, but is it workable? It does not eradicate multidrug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. As a result, tuberculosis remains the world's deadliest infectious disease. If you want evidence of that, look no further than the front page of today's papers, where the headlines indicate that in Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, we have outbreaks and cases of tuberculosis reported just this week. Late last year a University of Sydney student was misdiagnosed. The doctor thought that he may have had lung cancer and referred him to the RPA for tests associated with cancer. As a result, 10 others were infected with TB because of that misdiagnosis.

I suspect that this person was misdiagnosed because most Australians think that we have eradicated TB; that we have got rid of it; that it was an 18th-, 19th- or 20th-century disease that we got rid of and cured in the 20th century. That is simply not the case. It is the world's deadliest infectious disease. 10.4 million people contracted tuberculosis in 2015, and 1.8 million of those people died as a result. It is the leading killer of people with HIV/AIDS, with one in three HIV-positive people ending up dying because of tuberculosis. The burden of TB is heaviest in our backyard, in our region. Sixty-two per cent of the world's TB cases are found in the Asia-Pacific area. The Western Pacific is one of those areas where the concentration is the most per head of population. In particular, at Australia's doorstep, our nearest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, has the highest rate of TB infection in the Pacific, with 33,000 cases in 2015.

In my previous role in government as the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, I travelled to Papua New Guinea, visited the Western Province of Papua New Guinea and opened the Australian-funded tuberculosis clinic in Daru. That was opened in July 2013. It was a $33 million investment by the Australian government in a state-of-the-art, 22-bed isolation clinic and ablutions clinic at the Daru General Hospital. As part of that commitment, we also invested in a sea ambulance. The role of the ambulance was to travel up and down the Fly River to some of the most remote villages in Papua New Guinea to bring people who are suspected of tuberculosis contagion back to the clinic that Labor had funded in the hospital to diagnose them and get them appropriate treatment. I am pleased to say that that clinic is still going. It is still being supported by the Australian government and it is getting results. We have seen a reduction in the number of cases in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea.

Beside the human cost, tuberculosis in general and, in particular, drug-resistant tuberculosis, places an extraordinary economic burden on communities. It traps people in poverty. It is estimated that TB will rob the poorest countries of an estimated $1 trillion to $3 trillion over the next 10 years. The World Bank estimates that that loss of productivity attributed to TB is four to seven per cent of some countries' GDP. A failure to specifically address drug-resistant TB will result in major long-term human and economic costs and may ultimately pose a major threat to regional development and security.

In recent times Australian governments of all persuasions—coalition and Labor governments—have supported ensuring that we are working to roll out drugs, particularly across the Pacific, to reduce the rates of infection. We have done this predominantly through Australia investing in The Global Fund. I am pleased to see that the current coalition government increased the investment in The Global Fund at the last replenishment round by 10 per cent. Australia's commitment will go from $200 million to $220 million. That is because of the work of people like Warren and the TB caucus that we have established here in the parliament, and the fact that 87 members and senators signed the Barcelona Declaration calling for greater action on tuberculosis.

We had a forum last week where we spoke to people who work in this area. Despite the fact that Australia has increased its commitment globally to fighting TB, they did point out that in their view where Australia has fallen down, if you like, in recent years is in our commitment to funding research and to trying to find and develop better drugs and, ultimately, a vaccine to deal with this. Australia's commitment through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade into funding research and development has been patchy. In some years we fund it and in others we do not. If the world is going to be serious about eradicating TB we really need to get onto a path of consistent funding so that the necessary researchers can do their work and develop the drugs that will ultimately lead to a workable vaccine for tuberculosis.

It can be done. When you think about the fact that we have been able to eradicate diseases like smallpox and polio, it has been because governments have said, 'We are going to get serious about this and invest in the research to develop the drugs to do it.' It is amazing, given the number of people that tuberculosis has killed through the centuries and continues to kill today, that we have not worked enough to fund research to develop a vaccine to cure this insidious disease.

I thank all the members and senators who have been involved in the TB caucus. I am pleased to work with the member for Leichhardt on this. Again I thank RESULTS Australia, the Burnet Institute, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Doctors Without Borders for their commitment to eradicating TB.

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