Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that the early years are some of the most important in a child's life, in terms of their cognitive and social development;

(2) notes that a child's health outcomes can be heavily influenced from the period of preconception, and the lives and lifestyles of both biological parents;

(3) commends the work of Australian medical professionals who champion the First 1000 Days framework, a model that is aimed at improving the physical and mental health of parents from pre-pregnancy and up until a child reaches two years of age; and

(4) implores the Government to adopt a national approach to the First 1000 Days initiative, to improve health outcomes in our future generations.

To paraphrase the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia's children are generally doing well; most are safe and healthy; however, we could do better. The early years are a period of vulnerability, in which a child's 'outcomes'—their word—can vary depending on where they live and their family's circumstances, both social and economic.

I'm a paediatrician—I'm not a career politician—and my colleagues in this chamber would be well versed in the myriad of issues affecting our collective public health, particularly during the pandemic. I often rise, however, and speak about the social determinants of health and about how they affect the child in particular. When we consider a child's health outcomes, it's critical that we consider not only their experiences and environment in their early years but also the antenatal period from preconception onwards.

When she was Secretary of State in America, Hillary Clinton introduced the 'first 1,000 days' initiative as a way of trying to ensure that the health of American children was as good as it possibly could be, because it was increasingly becoming recognised that investment in health in those early times, from preconception to the second birthday, could have a huge influence on health outcomes throughout life—and, increasingly, that's what we're finding. That's why it's crucial that we consider the entire period from preconception to conception, the antenatal period and birth through to the second birthday, as the best time to invest in a child's life.

The men of Australia have a strong role to play in this as well. A great deal of the rhetoric around the First 1,000 Days initiative focuses on maternal health, but men should not get off scot-free. Evidence suggests that paternal obesity and paternal health can have strong outcomes on a child's initial health and long-term health.

As the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare stated in their study on Australian children, most of our kids and grandchildren are doing okay today, but that does not mean we should be complacent nor that we can't do better. On census night 2016, almost 20,000 children under the age of 14 were homeless. One in four children aged under five were obese or overweight, and 96 per cent of children in the five- to 14-year-old cohort do not eat enough healthy food. These are the changes we can make early on in children's lives that will change their health trajectory throughout their lives. We still have neonatal deaths, unfortunately—3.3 per 1,000 births. This could be halved if we invested more in early child health.

We experience shortages in intervention services such as hearing assessments, vision assessments and developmental assessments. In my own electorate of Macarthur, the waiting time in the public health system for developmental assessments is now measured in years, not months. The Shepherd Centre, who provide world's-best-practice assessment of hearing in childhood, are a world-leading institute that offers supports to children. They feel that only about two-thirds of the children who they should be seeing for assessment under two years of age are being seen. There are over 400 children in South Western Sydney with hearing loss as their primary disability who are struggling to get local support services.

I had to fight tooth and nail to get any form of government to support critical services in my rapidly growing community for simple things like breastfeeding support or growth and development assessments of children under age two. The state health minister in New South Wales, Brad Hazzard, understood my request for greater supports for early childhood development and child health, and he acted. We're finally getting our long-awaited Shepherd Centre in the Macarthur electorate to support children with hearing loss.

There are so many ways we can support a child's development and their health in that early time. Yet our rates of breastfeeding in early childhood are very, very poor in South Western Sydney; children are not getting the development assessments that they should be; and vision assessments are poor. Recently, I was contacted by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists to say that children were presenting very late with strabismus, or squint—too late for them to develop proper binocular vision—because of a lack of vision assessments.

We must do better. It's about improving our children's health by working through families to support them and making sure children are getting the right assessments. The First 1,000 Days is certainly the policy that governments should be introducing across Australia. We should have a national newborn screening program that's uniform across all states. We must do better.

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