Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I speak in support of the Social Services Legislation Amendment (No Jab, No Pay) Bill 2015, which introduces a 2015 budget measure that necessitates that children fully meet immunisation requirements before their families can access child care benefit, child care rebate or the family tax benefit part A supplement under the provisions of this new legislation. Labor support the public health purpose behind this bill. In government, we made changes to family payments to lift immunisation rates, including linking the family tax benefit end-of-year supplement to immunisation. Before the 2013 election, we made the commitment to make further changes that would continue the push to increase immunisation rates across Australia, and we are pleased the coalition government has responded to that push with this bill.

I understand that there is some controversy and a small number of parents who do object to immunisation and choose not to immunise their children because of fears surrounding the potential for adverse reactions. The best science that we have access to asserts that vaccination is the safest and most effective way to protect children from harmful diseases. If there is medical evidence of a child's adverse reaction to vaccination, then this bill, importantly, provides the opportunity for some exemption to these provisions based on that medical evidence and a propensity for allergy to immunisations into the future.

It is important that, despite those objections, the Australian government is committed to ensuring that every Australian child grows up healthy, happy and strong. We believe that parents have an obligation to provide support to ensure that that aim is met. A child is probably at their most vulnerable in those early years. They completely rely on their parents for their health and wellbeing. Vaccination is proven to be the most effective way to reduce the possibility of a child contracting an infectious disease, including a deadly infectious disease. So, from a public health perspective, there is strong interest in ensuring that every child is immunised.

In June of this year, the office of the Chief Scientist to the Australian government released a report detailing the benefits of vaccination. The report detailed that severe side effects from vaccinations are quite rare. The data collected suggested that there is a one in 100,000 to one in one million per cent chance of a child experiencing any harmful side effects as a result of a vaccination.

Through immunisation and the elimination of carriers to spread diseases, it is even possible to completely eradicate some diseases. This is how smallpox was eradicated, and we are almost there with the eradication of polio worldwide. I was at a breakfast this morning hosted by a number of NGOs that work in this space. The name of the campaign that is being undertaken to completely eradicate polio throughout the world is One Last Push. But the threat remains in respect of other communicable diseases, most notably measles and whooping cough, which continue to be relatively common and highly contagious. There is still a threat of measles returning to Australia, as was recently seen in the United States, with 644 cases recorded in 2014, despite the disease being declared eliminated from the USA 15 years ago.

There is a far greater risk that a child may contract a serious disease as a result of nonvaccination than there is of a child experiencing side effects due to vaccinations. Indeed, the World Health Organization estimates that vaccines prevent two million to three million deaths every year. Those figures are indisputable and too hard for any government to ignore.

I am assured of the safety and effectiveness of any vaccine used in Australia, as all vaccinations undergo a series of rigorous testing procedures before they become available. Moreover, scientists continue to develop easier and more effective vaccines to be administered. I have also done some consultations with local doctors in my community, and every single one of them assures me of the safety of vaccination and, more importantly, that vaccination is the most effective, the cheapest and, from a public health perspective, the easiest way to ensure that we are reducing and, hopefully, eliminating the potential of children picking up communicable diseases, so that we can avoid severe injury and illness into the future.

I was pleased recently to speak in this chamber regarding a bill which was introduced last week, the Australian Immunisation Register Bill 2015. With the increasing number of vaccines now recommended for adolescents and adults in Australia—such as influenza, whooping cough for pregnant mothers, shingles for older Australians and HPV for adolescents and young adults—the National Immunisation Register is an idea whose time has come also.

I wish to congratulate and thank all of those people who have been campaigning for improvements in the rates of immunisation throughout the country and, importantly, for government to take a more active role in encouraging greater immunisation amongst children throughout the country. I think particularly of those parents who have lost dear children to communicable diseases that could be avoided if there were greater rates of immunisation and there were not as much spread of particular diseases. I am thinking of course of Catherine and Greg Hughes, the parents of baby Riley Hughes, who died of whooping cough in March this year before he could be vaccinated. They have been very strong and powerful advocates for the cause of vaccination. To have the harrowing experience of the death of your child and then to be able to come out and campaign for a particular cause is admirable, and I take my hat off to Catherine and Greg and their families and others like them who have been great advocates for this cause. It is quite admirable.

Labor also recognises the important work that Medicare Locals across the nation were doing to increase immunisation rates, achieving a rise from 70 to 72 per cent from 2012 to 2013 for girls aged 15, and I welcome the support that Primary Health Networks are giving to this task into the future.

Labor is generally supportive of this bill, largely because of the importance of the task of increasing immunisation rates in Australia. We also urge the government to go one step further and include in the yet-to-be-released framework for the Primary Health Networks the goal to continue the push to increase immunisation rates across Australia. Immunisation has been proved effective. The medical science, the medical expert advice, is that this is the most effective and efficient way to reduce the spread of communicable diseases across the country. Quite simply, immunisation saves lives, and any program in which the government encourages more Australians to be immunised, and particularly more parents to immunise their children, deserves our support, and that is why I am supporting this bill.

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