Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will start by congratulating the member for Fremantle on moving her first motion in the House. The topic of organ donation is an important one every day that we come to this place; but particularly this week, which is Organ Donor Awareness Week, it is timely to add our voices to those throughout the community in raising the issue of organ donation and encouraging our constituents and fellow members of parliament to take the step of registering to be organ donors.

At the outset I also want to pay tribute to all of those Australians who have been organ donors in the past, particularly to their families and loved ones. It is the families and loved ones who are faced with the final decision as to whether or not a deceased person will be an organ donor—whether they will give that gift of a second chance at life to a person they have never met before—and many thousands of Australian families have made that brave and generous decision to donate organs from their deceased loved ones.

As we have seen from this debate and from other statements in the House this week, there is great support for organ donation on both sides of the House. This is a truly bipartisan question. There is also great support within the community. This is not unusual; Australians are generous, caring and compassionate people. But one thing we are always surprised about when we attend functions in support of organ donation and when we enter into these debates in the House is that, although 94 per cent of Australians support the idea of organ donation—that is the figure that has come out of various studies—we have not been taking the step of registering and consenting to become organ donors. That, of course, is the problem that we as policymakers in this country have to grapple with. As we just heard, in the last year only about 200 deceased people became organ donors, but they gave a second chance to some 626 other Australians. That still leaves almost 2,000 people on waiting lists, as of the end of last year—2,000 people who are wondering, every time the phone rings, if it is going to be their second chance at life. So we still have a lot more to do. Australia has a spirit of generosity but it still has a very low rate of organ donation when compared to other countries.

I am ashamed to say that I only became aware of this issue a couple of years ago, even though I have been in the House for a long time. A family came to see me to share with me their story of being on a waiting list—of what it was like not to be able to participate fully in life and to be waiting to see whether or not they would get the extra time in their life. I am pleased to say that that family’s story did have a happy ending. Their daughter has since been a successful transplant recipient. Since then, I have taken a great interest in this matter and I am pleased to see that, in that time, there has been a lot of activity by governments, both state and federal, to address the low rate of organ donation in this country. It began under the previous government, in which Tony Abbott was the Minister for Health and Ageing, with the setting up of the National Clinical Taskforce on Organ and Tissue Donation. This week, during Organ Donor Awareness Week, the task force reported its findings.

I note that in the past I have called for the government to consider the idea of an opt-out system in Australia but that the task force has not followed that path. I can accept that because I do realise that the evidence on opt-out regimes is very mixed. Spain attributes some of its success in organ donation rates to an opt-out system, but the US has the second-highest donation rate and it does not use that system.

In the time I have left, I want to urge everyone here to do what they can to promote organ donation in their communities and urge all Australians to register their consent on the Organ Donor Register. (Time expired)

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