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

I thank the member for Riverina for his wonderful speech and also the member for Macnamara for reminding us about the work of Dame Jean Macnamara, who became world famous for her treatment of children who had been severely impacted by polio. The member for Higgins is to be congratulated for moving this motion and commended for congratulating Rotary International, the global fund, Results Australia and the work they're doing to support the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

I'll happily speak to this motion, of course, for a few reasons. First of all, I consider myself a very lucky man: my generation of Australians were the first to receive polio immunisation. I have a cousin about three years younger than me who, unfortunately, developed polio before she could be immunised and she was severely impacted. I can remember talking to my mother about how terrified people were of catching polio, or of their children succumbing to polio. When I started working in the children's hospital in Sydney, when it was at Camperdown, they still had the mechanical ventilator in the basement. It was like a big metal piston which used negative pressure to breathe for children whose respiratory muscles were paralysed by polio. Some of those children didn't survive and some that did were severely damaged. Even if they survived, in the present time many of them are suffering from post-polio syndrome.

So polio is a dreadful disease. I myself have seen children with polio—not in this country, but in the subcontinent—in my early years of training. It's a dreadful disease and we must not ever become complacent about it. Many generations of medicos have now in fact never seen the childhood illnesses of polio, tetanus or diphtheria, or even measles, because of our immunisation programs. Those are really transformative: they've transformed the medical landscape in the developed world and are doing so in the present pandemic also.

However, in the Third World, in developing countries, polio still has the potential to explode in unimmunised populations. The work of Rotary International over many decades has been trying to eradicate polio around the world, and that work continues. We're still seeing cases of polio reported in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the potential still exists for polio to occur in other countries which have low immunisation rates. We've spoken about the present pandemic; some countries in sub-Saharan Africa still have immunisation rates for COVID-19 under two per cent of the eligible population. We will not eradicate COVID and we will not reduce the health impacts of COVID around the world until our immunisation rates increase.

Immunisation is vital. I've remarked previously on Australia's role in this. Australia must step up its efforts to increase immunisation rates around the world. And it's not just in Australia; it's to our north in Papua New Guinea and in the Pacific Islands, the subcontinent and around the world where we must try to increase our COVID immunisation rates. We owe it to our neighbours and to ourselves in general to get the world population immunised for COVID. We must reaffirm our commitment to eradicating it around the world. If COVID has taught us anything, it's that we're living in a connected world and that it doesn't take long before an outbreak of disease in somewhere like South Africa comes to our shores.

Health care has come a long way since I first started studying medicine but, tragically, there are still far too many deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases—not just polio but diseases like measles. We saw an outbreak of measles in Samoa recently that killed a number of children. It's always important that we recognise the human effect of these diseases not just on our population but on populations around the world.

Unfortunately, there are people in this parliament who are actively trying to undermine our immunisation program for COVID-19, and this must stop. I welcome any steps that governments take to further our cause in eradicating not just polio but other infectious diseases around the world.

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