Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Robertson for his question. Later this year, Australians will have the chance to vote to change our Constitution to recognise the place of First Nations people in this country, more than 30 years after the High Court finally swept aside the longstanding fiction that this was vacant land when Europeans arrived more than 200 years ago.

Australians will get a chance to give shape to that recognition through a voice to parliament and to the executive, and I can't think of a more important area where we should listen to that voice than health. For too many years the parliament and health ministers of both political persuasions have been confronted with the appalling health gaps that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, health challenges that unarguably impact Indigenous Australians differently, to use the language of the Attorney General, but also some health challenges that are largely unknown to non-Indigenous Australians, challenges like rheumatic heart disease which was largely eradicated from developed countries more than 50 years ago. It is a disease of grinding poverty. Doctors in our major cities will likely never see a case of rheumatic heart disease but the rates in remote Aboriginal communities are among the highest in the world, higher even than in sub-Saharan Africa.

These health gaps are reflected most starkly through eight fewer years of life for Indigenous Australians but they are riddled right through the system and, in some cases, they are, frankly, getting much, much worse. While cancer deaths, very happily, declined overall by 10 per cent last decade across Australia, they actually increased by 12 per cent for Indigenous Australians. None of this is news. We have all known about this for years and we have all worked hard to close the gap. But with the best of intentions and with substantial investment, the current approach simply isn't working and, in the few areas where it is, it's simply not working fast enough. Frankly, we do need a new approach, and I am confident that a Voice to the parliament and, frankly, a Voice to the health minister will help find better, more effective, practical ways to close the gap and allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to live longer, healthier, happier lives.

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