Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Cancer is a terrifying word. We use it all the time in this place. We often use it to describe terrible things or sometimes terrible people. But what's really terrifying is when a doctor says it. A couple of months ago a doctor said it to me. It was just after the election, and I'd noticed that a mole on my leg had changed colour. I'd always been paranoid about it and always asked doctors to check it, and they always told me that it was okay, but I noticed what I thought was a dark spot in the middle of the mole. I just thought that something was wrong. So I made the decision to book an appointment to see my doctor. It turns out it was probably the most important thing that I've ever done. I went and saw the doctor, and I told her that I thought the mole was changing colour and that I was worried about it. She said, 'Well, look, let's cut it off and check.' She thought it was going to be okay. She said, 'Look, if everything's okay, we'll just get the office to ring you and tell you everything's okay.'

A couple of days later they rang back with the pathology results, and they didn't tell me everything was okay. They said I had to book an appointment to see the doctor in a few days time. I obviously knew what that meant, so I asked if they could put the doctor on the phone. They said she was in with a patient and so she couldn't speak to me at that time. The next 3½ hours were probably the scariest 3½ hours of my life, waiting for the doctor to ring back. She eventually did ring back. She told me I had cancer, that I had a malignant melanoma. But she also gave me some good news, in a sense: she told me that I'd caught it early. That's important, because the next step was that I had to go into hospital and have some surgery. I ended up with about 52 stitches on my leg. The leg now looks like a shark has had a crack at me. But the most important thing is that I'm going to be okay. Here's the really terrifying thing: about every half an hour in Australia someone gets a phone call from the doctor like I did. Every half an hour someone in Australia gets told they've got a malignant melanoma, and every five hours someone in Australia dies from it. It's a wicked disease.

Let me tell you about a mate of mine in Melbourne named Jeff. At about the same time I was in hospital getting surgery, Jeff got rushed to the local emergency department with what he thought was a pinched nerve in his neck. They rushed him into hospital and did a CT scan and found two tumours wrapped around his spine and one in his lungs. It turns out that it wasn't a pinched nerve; it was stage 4 melanoma, and they can't find the primary source—they still can't find the mole. Jeff's younger than you or me. He's 40 years old. He has a 10-year-old boy. He has twins who have just turned four. Imagine going to hospital with what you thought was a pinched nerve and being told you've got stage 4 melanoma and automatically thinking: 'Am I going to see those little girls grow up? Am I going to see their big brother grow up?'

What happened to Jeff would have been a death sentence if it had happened 10 years ago. He basically would have been told to go home and die, but that's not the case anymore. The survival rate for people with advanced melanoma has jumped rapidly in the last few years. That's thanks to some extraordinary research and great new medicines. Jeff's on two drugs: one called dabrafenib and one called trametinib. A few weeks ago, the government extended the availability of these drugs under the PBS to people with stage 3 melanoma. I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for doing that. These are drugs that I hope are going to save not only Jeff's life but, extending it to more people, the lives of even more Australians.

The bottom line, though, is this: this is a deadly disease. It kills more than 1,500 Australians every year. The best chance of beating it is if you catch it early, which is what this campaign, Game on Mole, is all about. It's a truly Aussie campaign run by Melanoma Institute Australia. Their message is: take a photo of the moles on your body if you're worried about them. Do it this summer before you hit the beach. Slip, slop, slap, but also take photos of your moles and get a skin check. From me to everybody watching this: please do that. It's what I did. I took photos and I went and saw the doctor. It saved my life. Your doing it might just save your life too.