Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to acknowledge the amazing work of the Fred Hollows Foundation as they celebrate 20 years of restoring people's sight. I was pleased to be part of that recognition recently on 23 August at the official launch of In Fred's Footsteps: 20 Years of Restoring Sight, a new book that charts the foundation's impact and achievements over the last two decades, and the following week, at a photo exhibition and event hosted by the Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman.

For the past 20 years, the Fred Hollows Foundation has been working to restore vision to millions around the world, as well as teaching people in developing countries to undertake cataract surgery and manufacture eye lenses for themselves. Indeed, since 1942 they have worked with blindness prevention organisations in 42 countries throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Australia and the Pacific region.

Over the last two decades, the foundation has never lost sight of Fred's central vision of helping people in Indigenous Australia and developing countries to help themselves. It has learnt and grown through the passion of its people and supporters, both in Australia and in developing countries, who are committed to Fred's dream of equity in eye health. The book In Fred's Footsteps charts the foundation's impact and achievements over its first two decades, including the early breakthroughs of building intraocular lens factories in Nepal and Eritrea, and training eye surgeons in developing countries to perform modern cataract surgery, and its later work in building sustainable eye-care systems and lobbying on the world stage for resources for eye health.

Fred Hollows believed that everyone, everywhere, should have access to the best that modern medical knowledge can provide. As Fred once said: 'Every eye is an eye. When you are doing the surgery there, that is just as important as if you were doing eye surgery on the Prime Minister or the king.' As Brian Doolan, the CEO of the Fred Hollows Foundation said in the book's introduction:

Fred Hollows was not a charity worker in the sense of handing out goods and cash. His way of working was not to go into a community, fix a few eyes and then walk away. Fred was a social activist who saw the answers to people gaining access to world-class eye health care as a matter of rights, of justice, and of requiring broad social change if that dream were to be realised. He worked with people, beside people, building local capacities, local systems and structures, training local people to take control.

A number of Fred's key beliefs can be traced back to his work leading the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program in the Australian outback in the late 1970s. Fred spent three years visiting Aboriginal communities to provide eye care and carry out a survey of eye defects. More than 460 Aboriginal communities were visited and 62,000 Aboriginal people were examined, leading to 27,000 being treated for trachoma and 1,000 operations being carried out. As well as doing whatever surgery was possible, Fred and his team would never leave a community without providing a detailed report with statistics and an action list for GPs for glasses and any other referrals needed.

Following visits to Nepal in 1985, Eritrea in 1987 and Vietnam in 1991, Fred started to work towards reducing the cost of eye health care and treatment in developing countries. Fred organised intraocular lens laboratories in Eritrea and Nepal to manufacture and provide lenses at around $10 each. The foundation continued Fred's overseas work and, following his death, the foundation initiated a training program in Vietnam for surgeons in collaboration with the Vietnam National Institute of Ophthalmology. Since Fred's initial visit, the foundation has helped train and equip hundreds of doctors to perform modern sight-restoring cataract surgery and has expanded its support to cities and provinces throughout the country, in close partnership with local eye-care service providers.

I recently attended the amazing photo exhibition Fred Hollows: A global vision at Parliament House in Brisbane. Featuring photos from a range of renowned photographers, the exhibition covered nearly two decades of Fred's work in Aboriginal communities and overseas. Many of the images captured Fred's driving force to empower the communities he and his team were helping.

The Fred Hollows Foundation now operates in more than 20 countries. In the past five years alone, nearly one million sight-restoring operations and eye treatments have been carried out, which is approximately one every 2.6 minutes. The foundation has successfully developed a clear five-point strategy that is highly aligned with the international VISION 2020: the Right to Sight. Basically, that strategy is to (1) treat the disease, (2) ensure the local people are trained, (3) give the workers the tools to do their job, (4) build political will, and (5) ensure organisational strength.

Over the past 20 years, more than 220,000 Australians and 10,000 organisations have put their hands in their pockets to support the work that Fred began. The Fred Hollows Foundation is a truly extraordinary organisation—indeed, it is a development organisation, not a medical charity. I commend the foundation on its 20th anniversary and urge all Australians to help it to continue its vital work both in our own communities and overseas. As Fred himself said in 1992:

What we are doing is revolutionary, something the big health organisations aren't doing. They send eye doctors. What we are doing is giving these people the chance to help themselves. We are giving them independence.

The world is a better place thanks to the aspirations of Fred Hollows and the ongoing work carried out by his widow, Gabi, and the Fred Hollows Foundation.

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