Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

When I was first elected to the parliament, the Leader of the Labor Party was Kim Beazley. Kim is very well known to my friend sitting here, Gary Gray, and he is very well known to members of this parliament as an erudite man, a compassionate man and a great lover of American history, and for his great and good humour. But there is another thing about Kim Beazley: he had polio as a child. That is how recently this disease, which is now unknown in Australia and is on its way to being eliminated worldwide, stalked the Australian community. Our current Ambassador to the United States was one of its victims

Kim said that he never forgot the day he woke up, at just five years old, unable to move. He said:

I don't think contemporary Australians can comprehend the fear that ran through our community at the thought of polio.

That is what he said in an interview in 2004. I cannot imagine the fear that the little boy felt, but I can certainly imagine the fear of his mother. I think any parent can. I can imagine it, but neither I nor any parent in Australia today will ever need to feel it, because we have eradicated polio in Australia and will eradicate it within coming years around the world.

Polio was beaten in Australia by vaccination—in Australia, in North America, in Europe and soon in the rest of the world. We see resistant pockets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I am confident that the huge steps that those countries have made, even in the last year, will see us tackle this disease fully. Vaccination is one of the most effective and cheapest ways we have of keeping a community healthy. The examples of polio and smallpox before it show that, with proper eradication campaigns, we can eliminate many of these diseases and we can certainly save many lives. Vaccination is the reason that the number of measles deaths around the world has declined from 2.6 million in 1980—which to us sounds like just yesterday, and it was mostly young children who died from measles—to under just over 145,000 in 2012.

If you put measles with diphtheria, rubella, polio, whooping cough and all of the rest of these diseases, between 2000 and 2013 vaccinations saved an estimated 15.6 million lives. Smallpox has been eradicated, as I have said. Polio cases have dropped from the hundreds of thousands in the late 1980s to a few dozen. Around the world, around three million lives a year are saved by vaccination. And for each of those lives saved, there are others who are spared lifelong disability from the complications of these diseases.

Labor has a very strong record on immunisation policy. Raising the rates of immunisation was a priority for me when I was the health minister. It was a priority for Nicola Roxon before me, and I know it is a priority for the current health minister and for our next health minister, Catherine King. In her capacity as shadow minister for health she spoke very movingly last week about meeting two sets of parents, Toni and David McCaffery, and Catherine and Greg Hughes, who had tragically lost their children to the easily preventable disease of whooping cough. Having worked as a director in the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care, Catherine really understands the policy issues around health and community health. More important that just this systemic understanding, I could tell from her conversations with these parents, who have lost so much and have given so much to the campaign in favour of immunisation—and have become such targets in some cases of horrible internet trolls—she was moved not just as a health administrator, but as a parent, and I am sure she will take up this case as health minister.

In 1993, our National Immunisation Strategy brought consistency to vaccine schedules and vaccine pricing. We introduced the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register (ACIR), announced in the 1995-96 Keating budget. We support the expansion of the ACIR to become the Australian Immunisation Register and the expansion of the National Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Program Register to the Australian School Vaccination Register, capturing a greater range of vaccinations.

While I was health minister we added several new vaccines to the schedule, including the combination measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine—called the MMRV vaccine, a combined meningococcal C-Hib vaccine, and, of course, we also did Gardasil for boys. Just as we were the first nation internationally to do Gardasil for girls, we were the first to do Gardasil for boys, because boys are also vulnerable to HPV and to the cancers that can result.

We made important changes to family payments to lift immunisation rates, including linking the family tax benefit end-of-year supplement to immunisation. We worked with the states to raise vaccine awareness, and on successful strategies, like requiring a child's ACIR record for school enrolment, to identify children who had slipped through the immunisation net or had not yet fully met the immunisation milestones. This, accompanied by the very innovative work of our Medicare Locals, helped increase the coverage rate amongst five year olds from 83 per cent to 90 per cent during our time in office.

In fact, in just one year, from 2011-12 to 2012-13, the percentage of five year olds fully immunised rose in the Lower Murray region from 86.2 per cent to 93.9 per cent. In Broken Hill and the far west it rose from 89.1 per cent to 95.6 per cent, which is a stunning result. In Kempsey-Nambucca it rose from 84.6 per cent to 91.1 per cent. All three are marvellous results.

But we know that in some communities kids are still at risk. In the same year, 2012-13, 13 out of 61 Medicare Local catchments had less than 90 per cent of five year olds fully immunised. The lowest rate—and I am really quite ashamed to say this—was in Eastern Sydney, an area that is home for me, where it was 86.2 per cent. For last year, in my own state of New South Wales, the Northern New South Wales Local Health District, at the other end of my state, recorded only 87.4 per cent of children fully vaccinated.

Some children miss vaccination because their parents have forgotten, or do not know fully about the childhood illnesses their children should be immunised against, or they have lost track. There are a number of different reasons parents have missed out on the information communicated to them. Perhaps it is even in a language they do not understand. So it is important to invest in reminders, in education programs, in community awareness raising, and in making the point through reminders to individual parents and to our broader community about the benefits of vaccination.

But there are cases, of course, where parents deliberately refuse to vaccinate their children. They prefer to rely on the rumour-mill of the internet rather than take medical advice. I say to those parents: talk to your GP. As a parent, I took the advice of my doctor and all of my children are fully immunized. As a health minister, I took the advice of the medical professionals and I prioritised raising immunisation rates as one of the best and most effective health interventions we can make as a nation.

The number of children whose parents or guardians lodged what some people call a 'conscientious objection' to vaccination has risen from 0.23 per cent in 1999 to 1.77 per cent at the end of last year. I have said many times—and it disappoints me that I still see this language used sometimes—that the term 'conscientious objector' is completely inappropriate for people who refuse to vaccinate their children. They are not Quakers carrying stretchers under fire from the battlefield back to the trenches during World War I. These are people who are deliberately refusing to vaccinate their children, to protect their own children and our community against these illnesses.

I think it is important to note that no major religion has a prohibition on immunisation. This is a decision that parents are making based on dangerous misinformation from the internet. They are vaccine refusers. Vaccine refusers think they know better than doctors and scientists and, in doing so, they put the health of their own children at risk and they put at risk the health of other kids, of babies who are too young to be fully immunised, of older people whose natural immunity has broken down with age and of people who are sick with immunodeficient type illnesses and cannot be vaccinated. For the protection of our whole community, we need the majority of people to be vaccinated where they can be.

It is very important to say that we are supporting the No Jab, No Pay policy introduced in this legislation. We certainly said before the 2013 election that we would move further in this direction, and we are pleased to see our policy reflected in this bill. It ends the vaccine refuser exemption and it makes sure that only those with legitimate medical reasons to not vaccinate their children can access child care benefit, child care rebate or the family tax benefit part A supplement.

One of the most important things that we learn in managing our vast and vastly successful health system is that prevention is better than cure, and that certainly is the case when it comes to vaccines.

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