Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to stand and speak briefly to this report of the Australian Parliamentary Committee Delegation to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. I went to Tonga on a delegation last year, but not to either of those two places, with the Clerk of the House. I learned when I was there that there is something that our New Zealand counterparts do better than we do: they educate themselves about the Pacific region. In fact, members on the Labour side of the New Zealand parliament are required to spend their first study grant in the Asia-Pacific region. That is something not required of us but it is something that is very worth while. When you are in some of those Pacific islands, particularly in the New Zealand region, you realise how strong the connection is between our New Zealand counterparts and the members of parliament in those areas because of that consistent flow of people, which is now two-way.

So I am very sad to see that, at the end of this parliament, we will lose two members of our parliament who are perhaps the most informed about the Asia-Pacific region—that is, Bob McMullan and Duncan Kerr. They are both people who have over many years paid significant attention to the needs of the region and who certainly lead in our caucus in terms of knowledge and recommendations. They will be a very great loss. But it is good to see that the Prime Minister has declared that Australia must usher in a new era of engagement with the Pacific and has begun to send delegations to that area in order for us to learn a great deal more and to engage more with what are very important neighbours. The Prime Minister has suggested that we should host next year’s Pacific Islands Forum to send a very clear message to our region that we are really back in business in our relationships with that region.

The relationship is important for many reasons but, in particular, for health reasons because Australia has a very large and growing population from that region. In my area I have a very large population of people from Tonga, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands. They are very strong communities in my electorate and the health issues that affect their homelands also affect their communities. It goes quite quickly backwards and forwards: whatever issues are being faced in Samoa are also being faced to some extent by people within my community. There are also cross-border communicable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS. Australia has had a very strong commitment to providing aid in those areas over many years.

When I was in Tonga, I was quite surprised by some of the health issues faced there and the reasons for them. As we all know, Tonga, like Samoa, is a very sporting nation. If you look at the rugby teams you can see their commitment to sport. In Tonga there were young men, in particular, everywhere in their rugby jerseys, particularly Australian rugby jerseys. While I was there, the Australian schoolboys rugby team played the Tonga rugby team. The Australian team only just won, by the way, and they came back looking very bruised and battered. When I asked how many Tongan Australians were on the Australian team, I found that there were six. So one could say that the Australian team had a few ring-ins from Tonga.

Clearly there is a very important role for sport, yet Tonga suffers incredible levels of obesity. According to the locals, the problem of obesity was not always there and in fact is quite a recent phenomenon. Tonga used to be a whaling nation. They ate a lot of whale meat, which is very fatty, but it was one of the first countries to ban whaling, even though whale meat played such an important role in its diet and culture. But they retained their love of fat, which, when they were a whaling nation, was quite rare. The whales did not exactly float up on the beach, so it was a rare thing for the people to consume that much fat. Now when you go to the local stores you find imported cans of pork belly, which is something I cannot imagine we would eat in Australia. Yet so much of the diet in Tonga now is imported very low-quality and extremely fatty meat in tins, which contributes greatly to the obesity epidemic in Tonga, in spite of the people’s extraordinary commitment to sport.

As I read this report it is interesting to note the difference in the focus when we look at Pacific nations and when we look at Australia. In Australia when we talk about our health system we are really talking about a medical services system which, over the years, has focused on the treatment of illness and, more recently, prevention in the early stages of an illness—that is, the identification of illnesses early, such as breast cancer, prostate cancer and, more recently, type 2 diabetes.

This report is clearly talking specifically about issues which prevent people from getting good health in the first place. We are talking about issues as basic as nutrition, hygiene, clean water, the availability of toilets, the treatment of sewage—issues that in Australia we now consider to be quite basic but which, in countries such as these, are preventing people from being healthy in the first place. Clearly Australia has a very important role in assisting our neighbours to provide conditions in which a person can be healthy. Also, though, we have a capacity to learn from the focus on health which we provide when we talk about other nations in terms of our own health system. This is an important report. I understand it has been a very long time coming. When you read it and you see the range of recommendations and how specific they often are to one program or another, you can see how far we have to go in addressing the very real health issues of our neighbours. It is a very important report. It is a report that opens the door and asks a lot of questions of us all in terms of what we do and what we can do for our neighbours. I commend it to the House. It is important. It is a good read. As I said, it points out to me just how far we have to go in making a very real difference in the lives of our neighbours.

See this speech in context