Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today is World Diabetes Day. The theme for World Diabetes Day 2017 is women and diabetes. According to the International Diabetes Federation, 199 million women are currently living with diabetes worldwide. It is the ninth leading cause of death in women globally, causing 2.1 million deaths per year. People who have diabetes lose their ability to properly regulate their blood sugar. Out-of-control blood sugar can lead to nerve damage, heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and lower limb amputation. The total annual cost impact of diabetes in Australia is estimated at $14.6 billion a year. Around 1.7 million Australians already have diabetes, and they are joined by 280 Australians every day—about one person every five minutes. This means that eight per cent of the Australian population is already living with diabetes. This is expected to increase to 14 per cent over the next two decades. Diabetes is the leading cause of preventable blindness in Australia, and there are more than 4,400 diabetic amputations every year in this country.

Socially and economically disadvantaged people in every country carry that great burden of diabetes and are often the most affected financially. Most people with diabetes have a form of the illness, like type 2, that disproportionately strikes people, young and old, who may be overweight and sedentary. But when a patient develops type 1 diabetes, their body attacks and destroys its own ability to produce any insulin at all. No-one knows why, but, at the moment, type 1 diabetes accounts for 10 per cent of all diabetes diagnoses in Australia, affects nearly 16,000 Australians and is one of the most common chronic diseases affecting children in Australia. Type 1 diabetes low blood sugar can end in hypoglycaemic fits or even death, while high blood sugar might develop into diabetic ketoacidosis, diabetic coma and, within a week, death, to say nothing of the severe long-term health impacts that people with type 1 diabetes live with. Because of this, type 1 diabetes is responsible for significant financial and emotional burdens on those afflicted and their families and the community. Many who suffer complications lose their incomes because they cannot work and, moreover, treatment can be expensive. Insulin is unaffordable for many people in low- and middle-income countries, where most with diabetes are living, and, without insulin, type 1 diabetics die. Even in high-income countries like Australia, the cost of best-practice treatment, like continuous blood glucose monitoring, is beyond the reach of most.

I have come to learn a lot about type 1 diabetes over the years, as one of my staff has the disease. I have seen how well he manages. But that is all it is; it is just managing. Management of diabetes is all there can be, because there is no cure. While type 1 diabetes cannot be prevented, a healthy lifestyle is an important part of effective management of the disease. Indeed, up to 70 per cent of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented through the adoption of a healthy lifestyle.

The Labor Party are on record as welcoming the government's investment in diabetes treatment and research, including the provision of free continuous glucose monitoring devices to eligible children and people under the age of 21 with type 1 diabetes, but we do call on the government to extend this much-needed support at the very least to pregnant women and adults with severe hypoglycaemia and limited awareness of their condition who have never been able to afford the technology and the improvements in their health care that would provide them with a degree of safety. If the government wants to save lives, and in the long-term save taxpayers money, this is a decision the government must make. Today we mark World Diabetes Day, and we hope for all of those people who live with the disease that we find a cure and diabetes will be prevented in the future.