Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to acknowledge the great work done by the member for Macarthur, the Chair of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport, in undertaking this inquiry and bringing the report to completion. It is a really important one. I'd also like to acknowledge my medical colleagues on the health committee, the members for Higgins, Mackellar and Robertson, and the two deputy chairs of the committee, the members for Berowra and Lindsay, and other members of the committee but particularly the former member for Dunkley Peta Murphy, who is much missed by all of us on that committee.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:09 to 17:20

One in 20 Australians—that is, 1.5 million people—lives with diabetes. That is a number which continues to increase. Unfortunately, and terrifyingly, this country now faces an epidemic of diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is by far the most common form. In Australia it is much more likely to affect people of lower socio-economic standing. They're people who often have less access to clean water and affordable fresh food, have less time and less space for regular physical activity and often have less access to good quality health care.

In particular, First Nations peoples globally, but particularly in Australia, have a frighteningly high incidence of diabetes. They develop it at a younger age, and their progression to often-life-threatening complications is frighteningly rapid. Diabetes is the leading contributor to the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are nearly five times more likely to be hospitalised for diabetes related complications. Diabetes is the leading cause of death for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. The reasons for this are complex, and they include both genetic predisposition and a whole raft of socio-economic factors.

But many of our policy settings could be adjusted to immediately improve protections for First Nations and other vulnerable Australians. The first of these is the urgent need for action on our diet. Australians eat too many ultra-processed foods and too many foods with added sugar and hidden chemicals. Unhealthy foods represent one-third of Australian children's diets. One in four Australian children is either overweight or obese. Most Australians just don't understand how much sugar is added to our food. The regulation of food manufacturers in this country is rubbish, whether we're talking about dietary codes for infant formulas or the health star ratings we apply to other foods. Parents often think they're feeding their kids healthy food, but products which are labelled as 'containing no added sugar' can still contain added sugars in the forms of gels, pastes or purees. Only 22 per cent of the infant and toddler foods stocked in Australian supermarkets meets the nutritional standards of the World Health Organization. In particular, many breastmilk substitutes, or what we call toddler milks or toddler formulas, are effectively just sugary drinks. Labelling codes for those drinks and for other foodstuffs in this country are voluntary.

Only 41 per cent of products on our supermarket shelves display health star ratings, and there's a reason for that: the manufacturers of healthy products use them as a marketing tool, but others, the unhealthy foods, just decide not to display a score. The star system is also problematic in and of itself, though. It doesn't distinguish between natural sugars and added sweeteners. It gives higher ratings to ultra-processed foods and lower ratings to whole foods. We urgently need a mandatory food labelling scheme which will provide accurate and clear health information to consumers when they buy food for themselves and their families.

The health committee also recommended that the Australian government implement a levy graduated according to the sugar content of sugar sweetened beverages; these are sports drinks, soft drinks, energy drinks and vitamin waters. These drinks cause weight gain but they have limited nutritional value. They carry calories but not much else. A levy on these soft drinks would encourage industry to reformulate those drinks, and it would lessen consumption in the same way that similar measures have decreased consumption of tobacco and alcohol in Australia.

More than 35 public health organisations have now asked the government to levy a sugar-sweetened beverage tax in this country. But the major political parties, sadly, are not listening. Data from 85 international jurisdictions has shown that sort of levy is effective in decreasing sugar consumption. In fact, a recent study in the US showed a 40 per cent decrease in gestational diabetes and a corresponding improvement in obstetric outcomes, like low birth weight, after imposition of a sugary drink levy. That was within a couple of years of that intervention.

Gestational diabetes is a real worry for Australians, because it affects not only the women who have it and who are at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in later life; it also has permanent and ongoing implications for the children who sit in the mum's tum while that mum has diabetes during pregnancy. Earmarking the revenue from a sugar-sweetened beverage levy would be an immediate way of identifying funds which could help with public health measures, and that would help engender public support for this concept.

It was a great privilege to be a member of the parliamentary committee which investigated diabetes in Australia, but I have to say that much of what we heard was confronting and difficult. It's very clear that this scourge is something that will be a huge challenge for all of our healthcare systems in the years to come. The efforts of that committee will be wasted if this government does not act on the committee's findings.

The committee visited some First Nations communities in which we saw people with minimal access to fresh fruit and vegetables and who couldn't access affordable, drinkable water. We saw communities where children were carrying around two-litre bottles of Coke because it was cheaper than the bottled water that was the only other source of fluid they could access. We could help those people and those communities in the simplest and most fundamental of ways. We could improve the regulation of the food and drinks industry in this country. But, if we don't, we will all bear the cost of that and the loss associated with this plague that the diabetes epidemic represents.

See this speech in context