Kerry Rea (Bonner, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is almost unbelievable that in our modern world today, a place so often called the global village, there is even a necessity to move a motion such as those in the parliament. Sadly it is a fact that women are dying in childbirth at a rate of one per minute even as I am speaking and that roughly 24,000 children will die today of preventable diseases—things as common as diarrhoea and malaria. It is a reality that we as a global society are far from doing the right thing when it comes to preventing such horrific events from occurring.

It is also a reality that in any community, no matter how progressive or civilised we call ourselves, if we cannot care for our small children and for the women who bear those children and support them through pregnancy, childbirth and the rearing of those children then we are failing as a community. It is very important that all members of the House, regardless of the issues that they may have been battling over today, take some time to read and acknowledge the frightening statistics that glare out at you when you read this motion.

I was privileged to have a meeting in my electorate office on 1 April this year and it was far from a practical joke that a number of constituents in my electorate came to talk to me about this very serious issue. We had students and staff from Iona College, including teacher John Carroll. We had Erika Meerwald from St Peter’s Catholic Church in Rochedale, Jennifer Byrne from Caritas, Paul Mercer who is a Wyndham doctor and also involved with TIA, Mitchell Evans, Mick Doyle, Michael Lucas and Sam Hutsig, all students from Iona College which is a very large private boys school in Bonner. Accompanying them was Gillian Marshall who is the Queensland chair of the Make Poverty History Coalition and a tireless worker on this issue. As a result of the discussion with them I agreed that I would move a private members motion on this issue because we are falling way behind in our achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, particularly MDGs 4 and 5.

I would like to acknowledge Nell Kennon, the government relations coordinator for World Vision, who had a key role in the drafting of this motion. Indeed, it was her efforts, her work and her research that pulled this motion together. It is also important that we acknowledge the importance of this motion today, because it is part of World Vision’s Child Health Now campaign, which has been launched in New York and Nairobi and will be launched in Australia on Wednesday. So it is timely that this motion is going through the parliament.

What I want to acknowledge, though, is not just the horrendous statistics which tell us all that we must each individually and as a community be striving harder to introduce policies and provide development assistance aid for people in those countries where child and maternal mortality is extremely high. It is also important to acknowledge that the Australian government is well aware of this problem, that we have made commitments to targets around funding in development assistance for these particular goals. Indeed, as a result of this year’s budget we have increased funding by $200 million over four years for the United Nations partnership for the MDGs, which includes $42½ million for the UN’s Population Fund—a lead agency on millennium development goal 5.

It is important that this government has not only increased spending for achieving the Millennium Development Goals but also refocused a lot of that spending specifically to the issue of health, acknowledging the need to support more programs to assist children. When you consider that children die of diarrhoea and that with such simple medication as we take for granted they would be able to stay alive, it is so important that our funding is directed to this area. (Time expired)

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