Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's very timely to be talking today about global polio eradication. Polio, of course, was one of the great scourges of humanity in the early part of the 20th century and one of the most dangerous communicable diseases that we laboured under. It did not discriminate between victims or countries, from children in the Third World to people such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and an uncle of mine, in fact, in Trinidad and Tobago. Many new people were afflicted by polio, even until the 1950s and 1960s, in Australia.

What we've been able to achieve as a global community since the development of a polio vaccine has been little short of remarkable. Polio today is endemic in only two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are outbreaks from time to time in other countries, usually countries that are suffering from a degree of state failure or have highly fragile institutions, and we need to remain vigilant about that. But since 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative began, 2½ billion of the world's children have been immunised and polio cases worldwide have gone down by 99 per cent. It's a remarkable achievement, and initiatives such as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and global governance bodies like the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, have played an incredibly important role. In August 2020 the WHO announced that transmission of wild poliovirus had stopped in all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, so we're now focused on quite a small number of countries.

What this shows us is that, until we eradicate any communicable disease, it poses a risk to all of us and that the developed world has an obligation and an interest in helping developing or less developed countries to deal with this problem, not only because it's the right thing for our shared humanity, our shared values and our ideals but because ultimately we will not be safe from any communicable disease until it's eradicated everywhere. We are seeing that now with COVID-19 and the emergence of a new variant. It's no surprise that the deeper the disease reservoirs that exist for COVID-19, the greater the chance of new mutations forming and the greater the prospect of new variants emerging. These new variants can then quickly outcompete other variants and may well be more lethal or more transmissible or more likely to evade the protections of our immune system or protections afforded by vaccines.

This is really the struggle we're dealing with now with COVID. The developed world, especially Australia but not only Australia, has done a very good job of rolling out vaccines quickly, and our scientific community has done a remarkable job in developing vaccines for a new disease in record time by using new technology, using messenger RNA technology, commercialising these vaccines, scaling them and distributing them. But, as we're reminded, we need to make sure that these vaccines are not only in the arms of our own population but in the arms of our neighbouring populations. The member for Wills mentioned Papua New Guinea. The low vaccination rate there does concern me. Papua New Guinea is a difficult country in which to vaccinate people because the terrain is very forbidding, transport infrastructure is not great, public health infrastructure is not well developed and there is a degree of scepticism and suspicion about vaccines. Vaccination programs generally struggle in Papua New Guinea, but we saw an outbreak of polio in Papua New Guinea in 2018, which Australia helped them get to grips with, and it's equally important now that we help them get to grips with COVID-19 as well.

I think this omicron variant will only have strengthened our will to show that the world has the capacity and the means but also the political will to make sure this vaccination program reaches our neighbours. We've had great success in other parts of the Pacific, small islands, small estates, where the geography is a little more permissive and where public attitudes towards vaccination are perhaps a little less hostile—places like Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Samoa. But it's very important that, just as we had success with polio due to a persistent and well resourced campaign over many years, we bring the same attitude and resourcefulness and will to bear in the fight against COVID-19.

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