Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

As many would know, the government certainly believes that organ and tissue donation is a critical, life-saving issue. In the 2015-16 budget we committed $10.2 million over two years to increase rates of living and deceased organ and tissue donation in four targeted areas.

First, we will implement better matching of donors and recipients. We are going to replace the current National Organ Matching System with a new, automated Australian organ-matching system that will also extend support for matching liver, heart and lung transplantation. We are going to move to a one-stop online registration process. We are going to make the process to register as simple and as easy as we possibly can.

We are going to work to try to increase the consent rates of families for their loved ones to be donors. A targeted hospital improvement program will build capacity in hospitals so they can better support families to make this important decision. When only one per cent of people die in the tragic circumstances where an organ can be donated, we need to make sure that families are aware of their loved ones' decisions.

We will also extend the Living Organ Donor Program to increase the leave for living organ donors from six to nine weeks. We want to reduce the financial burden of recovery from these amazing Australians, who generously donate a kidney or part of their liver to save another person's life.

There have been many different views put forward in relation to how we go forward as a sector and with stakeholders, but we all agree that the rates of organ and tissue donation can be higher and that it was absolute common sense to review whether we can do better.