Senate debates

Wednesday, 10 May 2017

Petitions

Brain Cancer

1:45 pm

Photo of Nick XenophonNick Xenophon (SA, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on an issue that has with it much emotion and much passion and about which so much more needs to be done, and that is brain cancer. At the outset, I want to pay tribute to our colleague Senator Catryna Bilyk, whose advocacy for those with brain cancer has been nothing short of magnificent and whose own experiences have, in a sense, given her the strength and focus to pursue the fight for better funding for brain cancer research.

Last Saturday night in Sydney at the International Convention Centre I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the Cure Brain Council Foundation's annual fundraising event. It was a great night. The organisation is headed by Professor Charlie Teo, a renowned brain surgeon, who operates in many countries around the world, such is his reputation. The Cure Brain Council Foundation has done so much work and has raised many millions of dollars over the years in order to facilitate further research not just here but also around the world and to collaborate to find a cure for brain cancer. It was an extraordinary night. Jimmy Barnes was there to donate his time and two people each generously put up $30,000 in donations to karaoke Khe Sanh and Working Class Manwith Jimmy. That was a real sight to behold.

The fun of the night also, in a sense, highlighted the seriousness of the issue. We have a situation in this country and around the world where brain cancer kills more children than any other disease; yet 90 per cent of Australians are not aware of this fact. It is deadly and the survival rates are low. Ninety per cent of children survive leukaemia and 90 per cent of people survive breast cancer, but only 20 per cent of people survive brain cancer. And it gets worse: for some forms, such as glioblastomas—or DIPG—the five-year survival rate is much lower, at just five per cent. That is a very sobering statistic.

What concerns me and what concerns Charlie Teo and his team and all of those in this field is that brain cancer survival rates have barely increased in the last 30 years. The survival rates for prostate cancer have increased by 35 per cent; for cancer generally, 20 per cent; for bowel cancer, 19 per cent; and, for breast cancer, 18 per cent—but, for brain cancer, just two per cent. That is just not good enough. Brain cancer kills more people under 40 in Australia than any other cancer. Brain cancer costs more per patient than any other cancer; yet it receives less than five per cent of NHMRC and government cancer research funding. While there were some statements in the budget about that—which obviously I welcome—it is still around that five per cent figure.

I welcome the announcement in last night's federal budget that there will be $68 million delivered to help fund a proton beam therapy facility that will be housed at SAHMRI, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, in a second building, to be known as SAHMRI 2, in Adelaide. It will not be just South Australia's proton beam therapy facility; it will be Australia's proton beam therapy facility, because it will literally save many thousands of lives in the years to come. It will be a beacon of hope for not just Australians but also people throughout the region.

Importantly, those with very difficult to treat cancers, particularly those childhood and paediatric brain cancers, will be significantly helped by this proton beam therapy facility—the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. At present there is not one proton beam therapy facility in the Southern Hemisphere, and this will be the first. It is a more targeted way to treat cancers that are near vital organs or the spine and is less likely to damage healthy tissue. A particle accelerator targets tumours with the proton beam. It is something that I worked for; it is something that Senator Birmingham and others from the coalition side have advocated for; and it is something that the South Australian Premier, Jay Weatherill has worked for. And we got a good outcome.

The fact that so many people die of brain cancer and that the survival rate has not increased over the years is simply not good enough. The fact that 1,600 brain cancers are diagnosed every year—one every five hours—with the survival rate barely increasing in the last 30 years compared to so many other cancers, is heartbreaking. Brain cancer affects not only the individual but their family and their community. Many submissions to the Senate inquiry into rare cancers several years ago wrote in moving detail of the loss of employment due to disability following brain surgery, the loss of family income as spouses took time off to care for them and interruptions to education.

The cost of this terrible group of cancers is very high. It is wrong that only about $42 million out of the $850 million of NHMRC funding goes to brain cancer research. The solution is not to cut other cancer research; the solution is that governments must spend our money more wisely and well to free up the desperately needed research funds to find the cure. It is the aim of the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation to dramatically increase the survival rate by 2023. Instead of 20 per cent, it should be at least 50 per cent in six years. That is a heroic but, I believe, very noble ambition of the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation.

Medical research funding has been stagnate in real terms since 2013. At present, only 17 per cent of grant requests to the NHMRC are funded, down from 25 per cent pre-2013, which concerns me because it denies our brightest researchers an opportunity to help us unlock cures for brain cancer. It is a travesty that medical experts acknowledge that we waste hundreds of millions of dollars each year—some would say billions—on some medical procedures that may do more harm than good; for instance, unnecessary knee and back scans.

Some of you in the chamber may have seen that Dr Norman Swan, the health reporter from the ABC, did a Four Corners special in September 2015 where he outlined how much money is wasted in our health system. We have a situation where up to half of back and knee scans may have been unnecessary. The cost involved runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the case in terms of unnecessary procedures as well. That is a real concern. It is not something that just Professor Swan is saying; many others are saying it. Professor of Health Policy at Sydney University, Adam Elshaug, said:

We know that patients are being harmed by receiving tests and treatments that they should never have received.

No less than Professor Robyn Ward, Chair of the Medical Services Advisory Committee, cut to the chase on Four Corners when she said:

Often the best medicine is no medicine at all, or the best intervention is no intervention at all.

But that is not the case with brain cancer. We need to throw everything at it in terms of research to unlock a cure for this horrific cancer and the damage that it causes.

Right now, curing brain cancer is an idea that many regard as a pipedream, but a few years ago Fiona Woods' spray-on skin, Ian Frazer's cervical cancer vaccine and Professor Barry Marshall's cure for ulcers were also pipedreams. In fact, Professor Barry Marshall was knocked back on a grant application to the NHMRC before he went on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine. We need to acknowledge that as well. The road to getting there lies in our faith to keep trying and be disruptive thinkers, like Charlie Teo, because, if we keep plodding along with conventional techniques and conventional thinking, it will take us 50 years to reach the 50 per cent target, and we do not have that time to spare.

I want to finish by making reference to one person—a remarkable young woman who got me involved in this very issue in the first place, and that is Erin Griffin, who came from one of Adelaide's beautiful beachside suburbs. In February 2012, she was diagnosed with one of the ugliest cancers of all, DIPG. She was just 11 years old. I was privileged enough to meet Erin, speak about her in the Senate and instigate the inquiry into rare cancers. Erin could not accept that we had not yet found a cure for her aggressive brain cancer. Neither can I and neither should any of us.

In the days before she died on 1 September 2014, Erin, so gravely ill, was still speaking out on national TV, urging all of us to find a cure. And I pay tribute to her mother, Amanda Griffin, who, every day of her life, in a loving tribute to her daughter, is keeping the fight for a cure to brain cancer moving forward. We can do better. We are a clever country. We should be at the forefront internationally for finding a cure for brain cancer.

Comments

No comments