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

I thank the member for Bass for her beautiful remarks.

Today we farewell, truly, one of the absolute best of us. She was a fierce and funny campaigner for social justice, a public schoolgirl from Wagga, a warm and loving friend, colleague and family member. Peta Murphy was driven to give voice to the voiceless—to advocate for justice on behalf of those who needed it most.

As a local member, she was absolutely unparalleled. She loved her community of Frankston, and campaigned so strongly for them in the community and in this building. As a squash champion, as in most things, she ran rings around her competition and her colleagues, but always with humour and with humility. As a member of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport, she brought her sharp intellect, her warm heart and her deep and personal lived experience. As a solicitor, barrister and public defender, Peta had seen firsthand the corrosive affect that intergenerational disadvantage has on people, families and communities.

Health is at the heart of that. Peta knew how hard it is to get an education, or to hold down a job or care for your kids and your community when you're also battling ill-health. In her first speech in this chamber, she said, with trademark honesty:

…cancer sucks… I am neither unique nor alone in the fight that I am about to take on…but I am someone who has a platform that can be used to benefit others.

Peta spoke those words as the new member for Dunkley, having found out just two weeks prior that her cancer, that sneaky and indiscriminate foe, had come back.

As health minister, I know I dearly valued her advice and guidance, particularly as we worked to develop and then launch the Australian Cancer Plan last month. That advice and guidance came from a place of wisdom, a wisdom that sprang from her lived experience, her strong networks and her fierce advocacy for Breast Cancer Network Australia.

Peta was driven to use her platform to benefit others, right to the end, making the trip to Canberra last week, extraordinarily, to help launch a report for the Breast Cancer Network. The report was titled Time to count people with metastatic breast cancer—a way forward and it advocated for a national registry for metastatic cancer patients. Unfortunately, as we've heard on a number of occasions today, she was too unwell to actually attend the launch.

Peta's battle reminds us that the cancer journey can be a complex roller-coaster. It's not the simple matter, as the statistics would sometimes lead you to believe, that you either survive five years or you don't. The reality—and Peta's reality was—is often very different. That complexity is what drove Peta and the BCNA to advocate for a registry that measures breast cancer diagnoses in much more granular detail. What stage was the cancer when it was diagnosed and, in particular, was it metastatic? Is it a recurrence or is it the first occasion of cancer? It's only with more complex data that we can have a complete picture and a more comprehensive response.

Peta desperately wanted to be at the announcement of that report. In her words, she wanted 'to be a voice for those who feel invisible and as if they don't count'. The responsibility now lies with us to be the voice that Peta can no longer be. Her advocacy on this issue, as with so many other issues, has been compelling because what, how and who we count counts. I know that's something I've been considering very deeply since the release of the report last week.

Peta was also such a strong advocate for cancer screening: self-screening and the formal cancer screening programs that have been run in this country for many years. I know that she was concerned about how screening rates had dropped off over COVID, here and around the world, and of the need to turn that around for all cancers, not just breast cancer.

Peta also recognised that a range of the supports that Australians diagnosed with breast cancer have available to them are not there for Australians diagnosed with other cancer types. She knew and said that they should be. It's why I asked Peta to be part of announcement in Sydney last month, when we announced the biggest investment in cancer nurses on record. This investment will see the McGrath Foundation take their extraordinary expertise, reputation and experience in breast cancer support and begin to share those benefits across other cancer types as well, recruiting 100 new all-cancer care nurses. Peta's health, unfortunately, was such that she couldn't make it up to Sydney to be at that event, but I know that she would dearly have loved to have been there, and I would have loved to have had her there.

For Peta, cancer was a reminder, as she said, that life can be fragile and that we'd better make the most of it. And, boy, did she ever. Today we are reminded that life can be fragile and that we'd better make the most of it. Her friends at the Breast Cancer Network put it best when they said: 'Our lives are forever enriched by the life, the voice and the tenacity of Peta Murphy.' We are all poorer for her loss. The Labor family is poorer for it. The government is poorer for it. The country is poorer for it. It's upon us now, her friends and her colleagues, to carry her example forward and to advocate for and on behalf of women with metastatic breast cancer and all the other Australians that Peta championed.

To her parents, Bob and Jan; her loving husband, Rod; her sisters, Jodi and Penni; and every single member of Peta's family: our hearts ache alongside yours. It's an awesome privilege and responsibility to be in this place, and I want to thank all of you for giving her to us for too short a time. To her staff, particularly, but also her friends and colleagues in this place and beyond: we are also all thinking of you. I hope you know that your friend, sibling, daughter, wife and colleague made an enormous difference with every single precious minute that she spent in this place and on this earth. Vale Peta Murphy.

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