Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Will the minister please update the House on the actions the Morrison government is taking to guarantee essential services, including for those women suffering from breast cancer, as well as other health related concerns, by supporting women's health and wellbeing?

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

It was my privilege to join the member for Higgins on Sunday, Mother's Day, at the launch of the $354 million within this budget for the National Women's Health Strategy. The member for Higgins very graciously and movingly told of her own mother's passing to cancer. As part of that, we talked more generally about the challenges of cervical cancer and breast cancer and about our $100 million investment, the largest component within the Women's Health Strategy. But, importantly, we learnt that 3,000 Australian women pass from breast cancer every year. Over 1,000 women pass from cervical cancer, but we may well be the first country in the world to eliminate, or nearly eliminate, cervical cancer, with our screening programs and with our Gardasil program.

Significantly, though, there's more work to be done. I met a young woman—she's still a young woman—Alison Day, not long ago. She has triple-negative breast cancer. It is stage 4, and, by her own admission, it is only a question of time. She's a mother of two young children. She pointed out—and it was very powerful; one of the privileges of being in this House is that every day we meet people with real and powerful stories—that there was no program, as yet, for genetic testing or genomic screening for women in this particular circumstance so that they can have their cancer matched with the optimal medicine.

Whilst we have the Zero Childhood Cancer program, which does do this, and the national cancer genomic screening program, led by the Garvan Institute, this is a new frontier. We have looked at it, and we have listened to Ali and her wish. We are bringing forward, as part of this budget, a $5 million clinical trial program, which will open immediately and close in July. Admissions for clinical trials will be put forward, through a competitive peer-review process, for genomic screening that will lead to the matching of optimal medicines for triple-negative and other low-survival breast cancers. This will give people real hope and real opportunity.

At the same time, we are in discussions with Gilead to bring forward a new, breakthrough medicine that they sponsored in the United States, Trodelvy, for assessment by the PBAC. They have agreed to bring that forward. If it's approved, we will list it. If it's listed, that will save lives. Today is about making Ali's wish a reality.