Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just before I begin tonight, I'd like to acknowledge in this gallery, at this late hour of 20 to eight, Colleen Johnson and Sharon King from Palliative Care Tasmania. They've been meeting with me today. They've got some meetings with other people as well as me again tomorrow. Thanks for the great work you do. I really appreciate it. As you know, I've talked many times in the chamber on Palliative Care Tasmania and their funding issues. I will continue to push to make sure you get some more funding.

Sophia Cartwright was living a full, happy and adventurous life with her adoring husband and young family when she received the devastating diagnosis of terminal metastatic pancreatic cancer. Sophie Cartwright was just 50; her beautiful daughters were just eight and 10 years old. She was described by her friends as kind, funny and generous, with a smile that lit up any room. Everyone described Sophia as lively, but, like thousands of Australians every year, her life was to be taken from her quickly and brutally by this most insidious and misunderstood cancer.

Sophia's plight sounds like something from decades ago, from a time when diagnosis of cancer was effectively a death sentence, but this story is quite recent. Sophia died in February this year, 20 months after receiving her diagnosis. An Australian diagnosed with breast cancer today has a 92 percent chance of surviving five years from now. An Australian diagnosed with prostate cancer today has an even better prognosis, with a 95 percent chance that they would be living a full life in five years time. Even Australians diagnosed with melanoma, the cancer we've all learned to be particularly terrified of and guarded against, have better than a 90 percent chance of continuing to live healthily for five years or more. So what happened to Sophia?

Sophia's cancer was in her pancreas, so her chances of survival were dismal. Despite being better than the world average, the chance an Australian diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will survive more than five years is a mere 9.8 percent. Tragically, in addition to being very deadly, pancreatic cancer is quite common. In 2019, Cancer Australia's numbers show pancreatic cancer taking virtually the same number of Australian lives as breast cancer—that is, 3,051 versus 3,090, or about eight lives a day. How is this possible in a country like ours, with such advanced medicine?

The truth is that the wonderful advancements in survival for many of the cancers we hear so much about, and often contribute so much to, do not necessarily have any impact on other cancers. In the case of pancreatic cancer, there have been virtually no advancements in decades. It has traditionally missed both government funding and philanthropic research investment. Pancreatic cancer has been in the too-hard basket for as long as anyone can remember, or it had been until 11 years ago when the Avner Pancreatic Cancer Foundation was formed. This was the brainchild of Avner Nahmani, a pancreatic cancer patient who considered himself lucky to have had 13 months of life from the day of his diagnosis. Before losing his battle, Avner gathered together a tight group of friends and began the groundwork for the Avner Pancreatic Cancer Foundation, dedicated to improve the pancreatic cancer survival rate in Australia. As of today, the foundation has invested $7 million and funded 22 research programs across Australia, interrogating the most likely paths to improve survival rates, alongside some very promising but less conventional approaches. There is great progress and a real reason to be optimistic.

However, as these research programs reach the point that they can be taken into clinical trials, given the dearth of Australian government funding for pancreatic cancer research, they will hit a brick wall. This fantastic work carried out by brilliant researchers in our great public universities and medical institutions has been made possible by private funds. It has been an extraordinary story of progress, but all that progress will be for nothing if the Australian government does not provide the funding injection now needed.

As chair of the Senate select committee that inquired into funding for research into low-survival-rate cancers, I heard from many witnesses about the difficulties getting funding from the NHMRC for research projects that weren't already backed by private or philanthropic funds. As I've said many times before in relation to brain cancer, this isn't the way it should be. Research funding should be allocated where it has the best chance of saving lives. Initiatives like the low-survival-rate cancers and diseases grant opportunity have helped to tip the balance, but a lot more needs to be done. Adopting the committee's recommendation for a 10-year strategy for low-survival-rate cancers would also help give diseases like pancreatic cancer the research funding they need. Let's work towards a world where, for people like Sophia, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is not a death sentence. (Time expired)