Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not very often the member for Kingsford Smith and I agree on things, but we do agree that immunisation saves lives, and any program that saves lives is important. When my son and his wife had a baby, 16 months ago, we were not allowed to spend a lot of time with our new granddaughter until we had had our whooping-cough vaccinations topped up.

There has been a lot of discussion about this particular legislation, this Social Services Legislation Amendment (No Jab, No Pay) Bill 2015, in my electorate. A minority of people are against it. I am pro-vaccination. The member for Kingsford Smith and I were involved in an immunisation program when we went to Laos. We saw the benefits of that; it was interesting how the country has embraced immunisation and is really seeing its benefits.

The purpose of this legislation is not to save money, it is to save lives and stop the spread of preventable communicable diseases. If this bill passes—and it looks like it may, because Labor are supporting it—it will make an amendment to the requirements for recipients of family tax benefit part A and the child care rebate. These changes will come into effect from 1 January 2016, meaning that family tax benefit part A and the child care rebate will not be paid to the families of any child who has not been fully immunised.

The purpose of this legislation is not to save money by restricting the payment of the family tax benefit and the child care benefit, it is to encourage parents to keep up the immunisations for their children. I sincerely hope the savings do not come to pass, because the much preferred outcome is for all those families who would otherwise be cut off from payments to get their children immunised.

This legislation will remove the 'conscientious objector' exemption to immunisation schedules and extend requirements to meet these schedules to all children under seven years of age on any day the benefit is claimed. In this place, when we discuss immunisation, it is very important that anyone taking part in or following the discussion remembers this parliament should be making decisions based, solely, on evidence—and, as far as the evidence goes, the public-health case for immunisations is an open-and-shut one.

Mass immunisation is, perhaps, the single most effective public-health policy that has ever been in place. To all those with concerns or objections, be they based on philosophical or religious ideals, I would respectfully remind them that this is a public-health debate. It is about preventing the spread of debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases, and we heard the member for Kingsford Smith give the example of a child dying from whooping cough.

When the stakes are this high, we should only be considering an evidence based approach. All the evidence—the hundreds of papers of peer reviewed science journal articles, the clinical trials and the decades of data—points to immunisation of children being incredibly beneficial. The number of children under seven years of age not immunised, because of a conscientious objection, was around 0.23 per cent of the population in December 1999. By 2014 it was more than 7½ times that number. Even with that exponential increase, the children of registered conscientious objectors are a minority—amounting to only about 20 per cent of the total number of children who are not up-to-date with vaccinations. If a child is not immunised and it is not a choice that can be supported by evidence, it is not a choice to be supported by taxpayers.

I had some people, from my electorate, approach me with concerns over what they called 'government mandated vaccinations'. There are two key points to raise to address this argument. The first is that no government is forcing anyone to have immunisations. This legislation proposes that for those parents who choose, for whatever reason, not to have immunisations they will not have that choice supported by government payments. The second is that the right of a child not to get a disease, like polio or whooping cough, is a far more important right than the freedom of someone to exercise a philosophical objection.

There will always be children who cannot—perhaps for medical reasons—be protected by vaccination. There will also be a minority of children who are vaccinated for whom the vaccination is not effective. For those children, every unvaccinated child they come into contact with is a risk. As the number of unvaccinated people in the society they live in increases, the risk of transmission of disease increases exponentially as the group's 'herd immunity' is lost. The protection of these children from polio, diphtheria and whooping cough is a higher ideal than financially supporting an anti-immunisation choice.

The government's policy in this area is not all stick with no carrot. There is $161.8 million, over five years, for improvements to the National Immunisation Program's schedule of free vaccines. There is also $26.4 million to improve immunisation in adolescence—including incentives for health-care providers to identify children overdue for vaccines—public awareness campaigns and expansion of the HPV register to include all adolescents.

The legislation here today will reinforce the importance of immunisation, it will restrict access to conscientious objections and make family tax benefit part A and the child care rebate conditional on a child being up-to-date with their immunisations. As it stands, there are 39,000 Australian children under the age of seven who are not vaccinated because their parents object. There are many tens of thousands more who are not vaccinated for other reasons.

But the evidence is clear, and that is that vaccination is a safe and effective public health measure. Every child who is not vaccinated is at risk of preventable communicable diseases and is at risk of spreading preventable diseases to those who are too young to be vaccinated. I draw the House back to the example that was given by the member for Kingsford Smith of the child who was too young to be vaccinated against whooping cough and who died. That is one of the reasons why my son and his wife did not want us to see our granddaughter until we had our whooping cough vaccinations topped up.

This legislation will provide a significant incentive for parents of those children to get vaccinated and to keep that vaccination up-to-date. Where it is not possible for medical reasons to provide that vaccination, we will continue to offer an exemption clause. The government will not, however, continue to provide government payments to those parents who choose not to have their children protected.

As I mentioned earlier, this legislation is calculated to have a $508 million saving over forward estimates. Let me say it one more time: I hope that this legislation serves its purpose and that not one cent of the saving is made, because I want as many as parents out there as possible to ensure that their children are vaccinated. We need to make sure that we can keep our kids safe from these terrible diseases. No-one wants to see a child dying of whooping cough. Nothing can be more terrible than seeing that.

I commend the bill to the House.

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