Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in the House to acknowledge World Polio Day. World Polio Day is a very important occasion aimed at highlighting the need for the international community to focus on eradicating polio. Eradication is very close to being achieved, but there are still some final steps that need to be made to ensure that it occurs. If you go back to 1988, more than 350,000 people were stricken by polio every year. There were nearly a thousand new polio cases every day across some 125 countries. To many people in Australia, polio is something we hear about from overseas, but it was not that long ago that polio was a scourge in the Australian community.

Since that time we have seen, through the work of Rotary and through the work of a range of international organisations, an integrated campaign and effort to deal with this issue internationally. We have now reached the situation where there has been a reduction of some 99.9 per cent in polio cases, which is phenomenal. Members may be aware that there has only really been one disease which has been eradicated in our time, and that was smallpox. But we are now on the cusp of achieving the same with polio. That is why it has to be a focus. There are only two countries that have not eradicated polio—Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has now been over a year since a case has been reported in Africa. We can see that enormous strides have been made.

The important thing to remember is that with a disease such as polio, if you take your foot off the throat of this disease, it will re-occur. You have to put the infrastructure in place, you have to educate the communities and you have to keep the funding up to ensure that this disease is eradicated. That is where the Australian government has to play its role. We have a great reputation internationally as a contributor to campaigns such as this, but we have to maintain that commitment. We cannot look at it and say that it is under control and therefore it is now somebody else's problem to deal with. We have to play our role. If we play our role, as part of an international community and as part of a partnership between the private sector and government, we will see this disease defeated. We should also understand that the provision of the infrastructure to ensure that this disease is dealt with will provide an ongoing legacy for the poor communities who suffer from this incredibly debilitating disease.