Bridget Archer (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to stand here today, on the opening of parliament for 2024, to celebrate Professor Richard Scolyer, dual recipient of the 2024 Australian of the Year Award. Richard was born in Launceston in my electorate of Bass and attended Riverside High School before completing a bachelor of medical science at the University of Tasmania followed by a bachelor of medicine and a bachelor of surgery a few years later. Over the past 30-plus years, Professor Scolyer has established himself as a world-leading melanoma researcher and, together with his co-director of the Melanoma Institute of Australia and fellow Australian of the Year recipient, Georgina Long, they have saved thousands of lives through their research on sun-smart behaviour and skin cancer prevention.

The work of Scolyer and Long, through an immunotherapy approach, has meant that in just a decade the probable fatal outcome of a melanoma diagnosis has now become a treatable and curable disease. However, the pair are calling for further investment in their field, saying melanoma must be treated as a national health priority. In the middle of last year Professor Scolyer was diagnosed with a stage-4 glioblastoma and has used the terminal diagnosis to pioneer a new treatment, becoming the world's first brain cancer patient to have a free surgery combination immunotherapy. Although it is early days, he is excited by some of the results produced, saying he is blown away as a doctor and pathologist and that it has left him with optimism. I will leave you with his powerful words: 'Think big, be bold, be courageous.'