John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Leichhardt for moving this important motion. We used to speak about diseases on rare occasions. A friend getting sick focused our gaze, certainly, but more broadly, barring annual discussions of flu shots or the constant battle to outsmart cancer, there wasn't a society-wide focus on any one disease. Of course, 2020 has up-ended that idea and now disease is the first and last thing we talk about with every conversation. It has taken a deadly disease to bring us out of our stupor. But what we forget is that other diseases with terrible mortality rates are circling the world at any one moment. The difference is that these other pandemics don't happen here; they affect people elsewhere. Many of these pandemics have cures and, in developed countries like ours, only appear in textbooks. But they are out there, they are deadly and they are devastating in countries with less money and poorly managed healthcare facilities.

Tuberculosis is a case in point. Largely cured in Australia, it remains an overlooked threat around the world. As the motion declares, TB remains one of the world's deadliest airborne infectious diseases, killing more than 4,000 people every day. Many more people than Australia has lost to COVID in total are lost to TB every day. The exciting thing about TB is that we can treat it and deprive it of its pandemic status. The world has committed to bring TB under control through the leadership of the UN. Unfortunately, though, as with many health crises that hit undeveloped countries, the actions of the world are so often inferior to the words and ideals of the politicians and diplomats. Australia has a duty to help not just because the Pacific is one of the world's worst-affected areas. Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population continues to record TB rates around six times higher than the Australian-born non-Indigenous population.

I'm proud to say that we are stepping up in Australia, in the region and around the world. Locally we have maintained our record of good TB control, after bringing it to heel in the mid-eighties. Since then we've sustained a low annual TB incidence rate of approximately five or six cases per 100,000 population.

In the region, we're also stepping up. This government is providing over $21 million to the Queensland government to provide services through the national partnership agreement managing Torres Strait and Papua New Guinea cross-border health issues in the Torres Strait Islands, which includes the management of TB. Papua New Guinea remains our most significant bilateral TB investment with over $60 million provided since 2011. Additionally, Australia has committed over $47 million between 2018 to 2022 to the prevention, detection and treatment of TB through the Indo-Pacific health security initiative. But it is on the global front where we can have the greatest impact, as the dollars we contribute here are echoed by others to create an impressive multinational commitment to counter this disease. The government continues to invest in key multilateral, regional and bilateral programs to end the tuberculosis epidemic. At the recent 73rd World Health Assembly, Australia reaffirmed its commitment to ending the TB epidemic globally by 2030, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the End TB Strategy. To date, Australia has contributed over $830 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, with a further $242 million pledged across 2020 and 2022. We have also committed $57.7 million to the World Bank's Multi-Donor Trust Fund to support countries' progress towards universal health coverage, including for TB services.

As the motion discusses, next Wednesday is World Tuberculosis Day. We all commemorate the lives lost and commit ourselves to curtailing the future spread of this terrible disease. With COVID slowly coming under control, we must remember that there are other diseases out there that need our attention and need more focus after we have ignored them while fighting COVID. But COVID also remains with us. With resolve and dedication we can come together to fight pandemics and turn them around in a few short years. (Time expired)

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