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

I thank the member for Forde very much for moving this motion and for the other speakers who spoke so eloquently about it. Robert was a lovely little boy. He was four years of age—really cute, a soft, gentle little kid. I was the oncology registrar at the children's hospital when Robert came in to our clinic, and I saw him. Unfortunately, he had acute myeloid leukaemia and had just relapsed. It was pretty obvious he had relapsed—he had a big liver and spleen, and bruising all over him. But he was still so nice and well-behaved, from a lovely family. They came from Campbelltown, which is in my electorate of Macarthur. A bone marrow transplant was experimental in those days—in our oncology unit there had been five previous attempts at bone marrow transplant and they'd all died. With relapsed AML the prognosis was very poor, with virtually 100 per cent mortality, so it was decided to put Robert through this experimental technique of a bone marrow transplant. He survived, and he was the first surviving bone marrow transplant patient in the Camperdown Children's Hospital at that stage. He went back to live in Campbelltown , and I ultimately got to represent him as the representative for Macarthur. That was in 1981—well over 40 years ago—and we have lagged behind ever since with our bone marrow registry.

There are roughly 270 children in Australia who are diagnosed with some form of blood cancer every year—most commonly with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, or ALL, a significant number with AML and other types, and occasionally with lymphoma. The issue is that with our current system of bone marrow donation there are only about 150,000 people on the register. We have a very diverse population now. If we include the adults with bone cancer, eight in 10 people requiring bone marrow transplantation in Australia require a donation from overseas because our registry isn't big enough. We must increase the numbers. It is really long past time for us to have a national register to be able to provide bone marrow transplants from Australian donors for all who need it. Cheek swabs are a very effective and economical way of bringing additional donors to the registry, and we must include them. This is the type of technology that's used, for example, by the police force for DNA mapping of crime scenes et cetera. They've been using it now for many years, and we should have this as part of our registry.

A major obstacle, yet again, in our healthcare system is our federated system. This has created a number of obstructions to—

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