Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a question for the Minister for Health. Will the minister update the House on the government's strategy to improve immunisation rates right across the country? How does this translate into better health outcomes for all Australians?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Bowman, who, as a committed health professional, has been a strong advocate for vaccination all his working life. In March, the Prime Minister and I met with Toni McCaffery. Toni is a young mum who had a beautiful little baby called Dana. Dana caught whooping cough when she went with her mother to the drop-off at a childcare centre attended by their older child. Dana was still too young to be vaccinated. In this childcare centre, there were low vaccination rates. As a consequence, Dana's mum, Toni, nursed that young child as she coughed and lost her way through a battle with whooping cough and died, only a few weeks old. Our commitment to Dana's mum, to Toni, was to fight even harder to lift vaccination rates in Australia.

There are three big things that we are doing as a government. First is pursuing the No Jab, No Pay policy, which the Minister for Social Services has set out. We've made big changes only today through legislation which has been submitted to this House. It's a policy which has contributed to over 210,000 new vaccinations, to young children in Australia having higher rates. But that's being backed up by what we're also doing in relation to the catch-up program for vaccinations. This has contributed to 166,000 children having catch-up vaccinations, firstly in the under-7 category, but secondly in the under-19s, who are benefitting from the $14 million which was allocated in this budget. Thirdly, what we are also doing is, frankly, through education and awareness, taking on the anti-vaxxers head-on. We have no support or encouragement for, and no acceptance of, what the anti-vaxxers are doing. In our view, it's anti-science, it's anti-child and it's anti-health. And so in that campaign—

Ms Catherine King interjecting—

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member has been warned.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is not the moment, I would say to the opposition, to try to politicise this program. What we are doing through the work of Ian Frazer, who's agreed to head this program, and through the presence of Toni McCaffery and her husband, who have been part of the campaign, is say to the anti-vaxxers that, whether they are from One Nation or whether they are from any other party, they have no place in putting that argument in Australian public life. This campaign is being backed with $5½ million. It's taking that on. As the AMA and the college of GPs have said, it's vital and it's successful and it's helping save lives. At the end of the day, vaccination is about one very simple thing: it saves lives and it protects lives.