Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will be opposing this motion and the attempt to undermine the World Health Organization in the claim that they undermine Australian sovereignty. I think I'm pretty well positioned to talk about sovereignty in this place.

The World Health Assembly has decided to create a treaty for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and this decision was made by consensus. The Greens support this decision. The World Health Organization represents governments from across the world, all of which have had vastly different experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even within Australia, we've had vastly different experiences of the pandemic. I know that my experience as a Western Australian is very different from that of people in New South Wales or Victoria. This treaty will gather their learnings, and the WHO will draft and negotiate the WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

This is actually a good thing, because it's important that we learn from the responses of governments right across the world so we can do better next time. Australia needs a plan. We are now the only country in the OECD that does not have a national authority on communicable diseases and their control. The Australian Greens plan for pandemic preparedness in Australia includes establishing a national centre for disease control with $246 million of funding to lead a unified apolitical health approach across the entire country and to ensure that we can deal with the threat of new and emerging diseases; investing $250 million over the next two years into COVID-19 vaccine research; ensuring we can produce enough of our own vaccines onshore for everybody by building and operating publicly owned mRNA vaccine production facilities; and using a boosted foreign aid budget to invest in COVAX to support globally equitable vaccine access. All of these play a critical role in ensuring that Australia is as prepared as possible for the next pandemic.

I want to turn to how First Nations communities were impacted by COVID-19. To put it simply, without those lockdowns, which we all absolutely detested, especially in some of our remote communities, COVID-19 could have been absolutely devastating. These lockdowns actually saved lives. These lockdowns helped keep COVID-19 out of already vulnerable communities. I remember, before coming becoming a senator, I was working alongside some of those remote communities in Western Australia who actually moved boulders onto access roads to stop people coming in and spreading COVID-19. Some of these communities don't have access to clean running water and may not have access to health care to treat them if they did get sick from COVID-19. Indeed we know that First Nations people have significantly worse health outcomes than non-First Nations people. The life expectancy in Australia is 83.2 years. We are No. 8 in the world in this regard. For comparison, Hong Kong is No. 1, with a life expectancy of 85.3. Just to put that into context, for a First Nations person here in Australia, our average life expectancy is 71.6 years for men and 75.6 years for women—in fact, I don't have that long to go; about 30 years.

It's also been found that the burden of diseases may result in illness but not death, such as mental illness, injuries, arthritis, hearing loss and asthma, which all have a huge impact on other diseases because the immune system is already compromised, especially for First Nations people in their communities. We saw all through this pandemic that if someone had an underlying condition, there were more likely to become sicker and would perhaps have a harder time recovering from COVID-19. First Nations people are getting sicker earlier and for longer. In fact, what those statistics tell us is that we are dying earlier. This is still a shameful reality for our community and for Australia as a whole. It is the result of ongoing oppression that has been going on since colonisation in this country. We are already worse off, and if COVID-19 had been allowed to run rampant in our communities, this would have been catastrophic.

We've seen some progress being made, but, as we debated the most recent Closing the Gap report in the first sitting period in March, we know that this is not happening fast enough. Four out of the 18 targets are on track—only four. This in itself is disgusting and disgraceful. The other 14 are either not on track or there is no new data, so we don't even know how we're tracking. That in itself is a huge problem that needs to be addressed. For First Nations people, good health is more than just the absence of disease or illness; it's a holistic concept that includes physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual wellbeing both for an individual and for their communities. That's why it's so important to have community led health care because First Nations people understand this. We understand the cultural difference between First Nations people's health and non-First Nations people's health, and that must be taken into consideration to provide adequate health and wellbeing care. This is integral to the success of the Closing the Gap initiatives. We need First Nations people deeply embedded in our approaches as we tackle these issues, from housing to health care to education to incarceration. It is not enough to be in consultation with First Nations people. The solutions need to be First Nations created, led and managed.

One element of the pandemic preparedness is to ensure remote communities have access both to clean water and community led health care, and it is about making progress in all of the aspects of Closing the Gap because the healthier our communities are, the better we will be able to face the next pandemic. Thank you.