Bob Carr (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's efforts to help the government of PNG address tuberculosis help treat people in their communities, in their homes in Western Province. This approach is based on the World Health Organisation's Stop TB strategy and has proved most successful. It is critical in preventing multi-drug-resistant TB developing and spreading.

But there has, I am sad to report to the Senate, been a smear campaign targeting Australia's impressive efforts to address this issue in a country that, on average, has 14,000 new TB cases diagnosed per year. It is an issue that has been politicised, I am sad to relate, by the member for Leichhardt. He said Australia's life-saving assistance, this fine work helping PNG and Western Province, has been 'grossly mismanaged by bureaucrats'. His claims have been criticised as derogatory and negative by, among others, Dr Smith Pinai of Daru General Hospital in a letter to the Australian High Commission in June last year. The opinion of the member for Leichhardt flies in the face of professional medical assessments made by the World Health Organisation, which in November 2012 in its major document on TB monitoring found there had been 'clear progress in TB prevention and control in South Fly' since its last review.

Associate Professor Emma McBryde, the Head of Epidemiology at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Service at Royal Melbourne Hospital, concluded in her report on this subject that the current approach, including treating Papua New Guineans in their own communities, is the right approach. Even the Queensland government itself, the coalition's poster child, has endorsed the approach. In a statement from Queensland's Premier, Mr Campbell Newman, and its health minister, Mr Lawrence Springborg, in a press release on 15 May, they stated that by providing the best treatment— (Time expired)