Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Macarthur, whose contributions on this and other matters are always so well considered and well thought out. I particularly want to reiterate, before I get into my speech, his point about immunisation and vaccines because it is well made and timely. Importantly, in this debate it is worth reminding people of what the member for Macarthur just said, which is that we now live in a world largely free of polio, and we are very lucky in Australia, but that this didn't just happen; this happened because public health officials globally—not just in one country but globally—made a concerted effort to eliminate polio from their countries so that we could live free of it. That's something that was achieved through vaccines that led to immunisations.

Even though it doesn't naturally flow, I also at this point want to thank Rotary International, because this was a program—and I stand to be corrected—in which they decided in the 1960s to eliminate polio from the face of the world, and they are so very close. They are incredibly close to achieving that. I came across that point when I was watching, during the recent pandemic lockdown we had—so some good came of it—Inside Bill's Brain,which is about how Bill Gates, with Rotary, has used the power of data to drive polio from so many countries. We got so very close to eliminating polio from the face of this planet, but, unfortunately, we were not successful at that time because there were hard-to-reach regions on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. We've had the withdrawal of the security forces in Afghanistan; that will now complicate matters more. Of course, the pandemic also made it very difficult for us to reach those people that needed to be reached. But we have learnt so much and we should not give up, because we are so close.

It is for that reason that Australia is committed to the global eradication of polio, and we have supported not just as a government but as a nation the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, otherwise known as GPEI. Australia itself was declared polio free in 2000, and I think it's important to remember that that was only very recent. The other day I was watching something with my 12-year-old and a thing came up saying, 'Imagine if you were transported back to a time long ago,' and it was 1994. I thought, I remember 1994 very well, so it wasn't that long ago, hopefully! But 2000 is very recent, and it was only then that we could officially say that we were polio free. It remains endemic in two countries, though there are suspicions that it is also endemic in a number of African nations. But the two that we know of are Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until poliovirus transmission is interrupted in these countries, other countries remain at risk of importation of polio. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed challenges to polio eradication goals, through disruptions to immunisation programs and surveillance, making 2022 a critical year for polio eradication activities.

So Australia, along with the western Pacific region—and the member for Macarthur was making this very good point—was declared polio free in 2000, but there is still much work that we need to do and that we need to stay on top of in the South Pacific. We have an excellent record when it comes to polio control, with the last case of poliomyelitis caused by locally acquired wild polio virus in Australia reported in 1972 and the last imported case of WPV reported in 2007. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted public health globally through the disruptions to surveillance and immunisation activities, although we hope that this will change next year.

See this speech in context