Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking to the Australian National Preventive Health Agency (Abolition) Bill 2014 I just want to emphasise that the preventive health effort will continue if this bill is passed. The efforts in reducing smoking, reducing levels of harmful drinking and addressing our growing problem with overweight and obesity will be where they have always been at the Commonwealth level, and that is in the Department of Health.

Right now some of the claims that have been made that this winds back decades of effort in preventative health are absolute rubbish! What absolute rubbish, the idea that abolishing the Australian National Preventive Health Agency will wind back decades of progress in this area. This is a new agency that came out of one of the peaks of Kevin Rudd-style activism.

The previous speaker election the fact that people are not eating the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables. That is correct. But how many people know that there was a national partnership agreement with all of the states and territories where we were going to measure the amount of fruit and vegetables that each state and territory was eating, and the states were going to be given reward payments for this. What we now know is that those national agreements, and the National Agreement on Preventive Health, have been a spectacular failure.

One of the issues with the Australian National Preventive Health Agency was that it was meant to be a collaborative effort with the state and territory governments. The state and territory governments do have jurisdiction over the preventive health agency, and yet no state or territory has ever put in one dollar into the preventive health agency.

So we see duplication and confusion about the roles between the agency and the Department of Health. If you look at the area of tobacco control, the Australian record is one that we should be very proud of. Over the last 33 years we have seen the rates of tobacco smoking amongst men and women decline in both genders by more than 40 per cent. And there is only a handful of countries that have seen anything like that progress. Really, Australia now has one of the lowest smoking rates of anywhere in the world and we are a country that has been very successful in changing the culture and reducing the levels of smoking. And that will continue.

There have been a lot of good reports provided to government, and the Preventative Health Taskforce did actually outline a lot of things that any government can pick up on. When we look at smoking, there are many groups where smoking rates are still too high: the Indigenous community, people with mental health issues and lower socioeconomic groups. Any future campaigns really need to look at those groups.

When we look at alcohol, Australia is in the middle ranks of OECD countries in alcohol consumption. We do have problems with levels of harmful drinking. We have got problems with binge drinking. One of the things that came out of the Preventative Health Taskforce was: while there are a lot of measures that are controversial, there is one that actually is not controversial and which provides enormous benefit—that is, a targeted intervention from a general practitioner really does pay dividends. That is something that I think this government needs to focus on.

It is true, when we look at our levels of overweight and obese Australians, that we are one of the top countries now. It is not something to be proud of. It is something which has happened within the space of a generation. All countries are seeing this. France has had some success in actually halting it and there is some evidence from the United States that they have had some success in stabilising their very high levels of obesity.

One of the campaigns in this area that I think was a particularly good one and which has continued is the Measure Up campaign. It started in 2006 and it recognised that in this area you need to have TV advertising, you need to have advertising on bus shelters and you need to work with health professionals especially GPs so they have got the material. It does require a multipronged strategy to really start to get our nation healthy, otherwise there will be a huge burden in the future.

The preventative health effort will continue. It will be run by the Department of Health at the Commonwealth level. The buck will stop with the Minister for Health and the Assistant Minister for Health. One of the things that I think is of concern around the country is the state and territory governments are getting out of the primary health care space, the preventative health space and the community health space at a rate of knots. They have taken the opportunity from Kevin Rudd's dramatic reforms to vacate that space. It is something that is going to be left with the Commonwealth government in the future. We need to continue to have strong tobacco control policies. We need to do much better in the areas of alcohol and obesity because those things will continue.

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