Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Industry and Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege for me to report on the meeting I had on 15 June with my wonderful local advocates from the JDRF who are fighting the great battle in the cause of juvenile diabetes research—wonderful local people like Mel and her son Lawrence, who has been public as a four-year-old boy who is leading the charge on fundraising in this cause, and Rhianna and her beautiful daughter Cassie. I almost felt like a godfather to Cassie, as I watched her grow up and saw her fighting her struggles with diabetes type 1. There is a lot of work to do to make sure the community understands there is a big difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. This is not a lifestyle issue; this is a genetic issue. We have a lot of work to do to continue our battles.

In Eden-Monaro, we have 9.9 per cent of National Diabetes Services Scheme registrants—a higher rate than the national rate. Overall, 122,300 Australians are fighting the type 1 diabetes battle every day. We have made progress. Life expectancy was limited, with people dying in their 40s, but now we are pushing that out into the 60s with the effort that has gone on. It has been a great, bipartisan effort right across the board, going back to when we were in government, in getting the clinical trial network funded and changes to eligibility for federal government carers allowance. Then, of course, there was the funding for insulin pumps and the subsidies from 2008 carrying forward to the current government's support for the clinical research networks.

We are only in the early stages of a lot of this battle, and it is important that when the clinical research network funding expires in June 2019 next year we move into phase 3 of that project. Already, we've seen great benefits from it: 1,500 people with type 1 diabetes are accessing new therapies and enhanced care. There are 1,400 families engaged in this world-leading project on prevention. We are getting benchmarking of clinical outcomes for over 10,000 patients out of phases 1 and 2 of the clinical research network.

It is important we move on to the third stage of this network. It probably will require about $50 million of funding, but it is kicking goals. It is a terrible disease which has really crimped the lifestyle of not only the kids who are affected by this but the families who struggle through it. We have seen, not only in relation to the technology around the insulin pump for kids but now in the development of apps that allow teachers and other carers to remotely monitor the levels of these kids, a bit of liberation in the way the kids are able to go to school and be looked after by other people. I thank these advocates, and we need to push for the next stage.