Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Bowman, who, as a committed health professional, has been a strong advocate for vaccination all his working life. In March, the Prime Minister and I met with Toni McCaffery. Toni is a young mum who had a beautiful little baby called Dana. Dana caught whooping cough when she went with her mother to the drop-off at a childcare centre attended by their older child. Dana was still too young to be vaccinated. In this childcare centre, there were low vaccination rates. As a consequence, Dana's mum, Toni, nursed that young child as she coughed and lost her way through a battle with whooping cough and died, only a few weeks old. Our commitment to Dana's mum, to Toni, was to fight even harder to lift vaccination rates in Australia.

There are three big things that we are doing as a government. First is pursuing the No Jab, No Pay policy, which the Minister for Social Services has set out. We've made big changes only today through legislation which has been submitted to this House. It's a policy which has contributed to over 210,000 new vaccinations, to young children in Australia having higher rates. But that's being backed up by what we're also doing in relation to the catch-up program for vaccinations. This has contributed to 166,000 children having catch-up vaccinations, firstly in the under-7 category, but secondly in the under-19s, who are benefitting from the $14 million which was allocated in this budget. Thirdly, what we are also doing is, frankly, through education and awareness, taking on the anti-vaxxers head-on. We have no support or encouragement for, and no acceptance of, what the anti-vaxxers are doing. In our view, it's anti-science, it's anti-child and it's anti-health. And so in that campaign—

Ms Catherine King interjecting—

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