David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority Amendment (Disclosure of Information) Bill 2023. I do want to follow its analysis in the Senate, as the former speaker on the bill outlined. It is an unfortunate reality that there are 14,000 Australians sitting on dialysis machines, having their bodies filtered because their kidneys have reached such a stage of decay that they can't filter all the toxins. That's just people on dialysis. Receiving a donated live kidney, either from a relative or from a donor who is matched with a person in an immunological sense, is a gift that changes that person's life instantaneously for the life of the transplant. The life of this graft, if it's well managed with all the latest immunological drugs that allow a donor's kidney to thrive and function in a recipient, means that that recipient's life can be changed for 20 or 30 years, and that's incredible.

The dilemma, though, is that there are not enough people donating. The essence of this bill is legislative change that will allow encouragement and role modelling of the dramatic effect that donation has by personalising it once authority has been obtained from the close family and relatives of someone who has been a donor or a recipient. If those families are willing to give that consent, all's well and good. It sounds a bit gory, but it has been clothed in a lot of appropriate secrecy. If the family is happy, I think it will result in much greater transplantation outcomes. To put it in perspective, 170,000 Australians annually shuffle off this mortal coil and go to a better place—at least, I hope they all do—but only 80,000 them die in hospital. To become a donor, as well as dying in hospital, a person has to be in an ICU or in a high-care situation where a transplant can occur. The really critical thing is, though, that a lot of those people who end up there haven't spoken about the possibility of becoming a donor. They haven't even thought about it, and they haven't spoken to their family about it.

In the last parliament and in the parliament before that, I was the minister looking after the Organ and Tissue Authority. I know that they've been doing fantastic work—and I would like to acknowledge here all the work they've been doing—as a result of which, over a period of 10 years up to 2019, the number of donations has doubled. Everyone thinks: 'We've got a couple of hundred thousand people who have registered. Why do we have any waiting list for organs?' That's because the reality is that only a small part of a very large pool can realistically come a donor.

I encourage all Australians to consider this. It is a very altruistic thing for you to think about. You might think: 'Well, if I've used up all my heartbeats and I'm moving on, why don't I donate a part of my body and help somebody else be liberated and have a great life without being stuck to a machine or an oxygen tank or be coughing their life away?' Their liver can be regenerated. It's a really amazing gift to be a donor. So I encourage everyone who hasn't thought about it or who hasn't already done it to do what I did a couple of years ago. I thought, 'My dodgy old body has probably got a bit of life left in it.' It took me two minutes with my Medicare card and my iPhone to go to www.donatelife.gov.au and register myself. Once you've done that, the next thing you should do is tell all your family members, 'By the way, if I suddenly end up in ICU, and I've run out of time, I've already signed up to be a donor.' That is probably the most targeted way that you can help the system.

As I said, this bill has provisions to allow a broader scope of family members to give that permission. That's the part that we have to look at closely. You can't just make it open slather, but, if that permission being granted could happen more often for those people in ICU, we would get much better figures than we have now. Last year, 1,300 families were asked whether their relative would consent to being a donor and whether they would give their consent. Unfortunately, only 701 families said yes. So a lot of those potentially life-saving organs and tissues weren't able to be utilised. Last year we had 454 donors, which was a rise of eight per cent, which is great. We had an enormous increase in the number of people who ticked that they would allow transplantation of their cornea—that's the shiny bit on the front of your eyes—for corneal diseases, which can send people virtually blind. As well as that, there were living related and unrelated donors: people who weren't dying but donated a kidney, in particular, for someone who matched their immune markers. There were many donations of hearts, lungs, pancreases, intestines and, as I said, kidneys.

I think the important thing for everyone to realise is that it is better that we have many more people on the bottom of the triangle as potential donors. Hopefully, we all live a regular life, and we don't all of a sudden end up in an ICU or on a life-support system. But if we have hundreds of thousands more people who have taken the time to let their family members know that, if a sudden accident or something happens, they have ticked the box and registered, we will get much more better outcomes.

I would also like to congratulate and thank all the people working in this space around the country, whether you are in intensive care or in the kidney unit of hospitals. My younger sister spent her career here in the ACT, negotiating and running parts of the nursing of the transplant unit here in Woden hospital. Congratulations to all the people around the country. I worked as a kidney registrar at one stage, looking after people who had been transplanted. There is a huge back office behind any one transplantation. There are clinics, blood tests and drugs and then there is keeping up to date with everything.

Australia is blessed with a wonderful health system compared to other countries, but we could always do better. Hopefully, the bill will allow more storytelling by family members because it is a powerful and inspirational story to hear—how your loved one has passed on but they passed on the gift of life to up to seven other people by ticking the box. Like I said, go to donatelife.org.au, get your Medicare card out and register, just in case that is what happens to you.

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