Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

According to one fact sheet, each year about 35,000 Australians are admitted to hospital with a stroke. As other speakers have pointed out, it is the second leading cause of death and disability throughout the country. The latest figures I have seen suggest that over 440,000 Australians have had a stroke at some time in their life and about a third of those have been left with a disability. One in six Australians are likely to suffer a stroke at some time during their lifetime. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have twice the rate of hospitalisation from stroke and are 1.6 more times more likely to die from stroke than non-Indigenous Australians. With a similar trend, people living in remote and very remote Australia have 1.4 times the rate of stroke than people living in major cities and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have 1.3 times the rate of stroke than people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed it seems to be a recurring trend that inequality and poor health go hand in hand.

In 2013, Deloitte Access Economics put the financial cost of stroke to the Australian economy at $5 billion with $3 billion of that being in lost productivity. The more important cost, however, is the impact on the lives of those people affected and on the lives of their family members who often become their carers. We simply cannot put a figure on the value of that. If a person is left with a serious disability because of a stroke it can become an incredible strain on the whole family. Not surprisingly, stroke support groups have emerged across the country to deal with stroke. From my experience with the local stroke support area groups in my area, they do a marvellous job.

By raising community awareness, which Stroke Week aims to do, we can: minimise the effects of stroke if it does occur; help families manage the ongoing care, lifestyle changes and rehabilitation process; and take preventative action to lessen the risk of stroke. Inevitably, however, when a stroke does occur, medical treatment becomes increasingly necessary. That means more GP visits, more pathology tests, more diagnostic imaging, more medication, more hospitalisation, more surgery times and certainly more rehabilitation with several allied health professionals contributing in the recovery process.

We also know that over two-thirds of stroke victims are over 65 years of age and that many of those people are either in an aged care facility or will ultimately end up in one. So the government's freeze on Medicare rebates until 2020, cuts to hospital funding, cuts to pathology and diagnostic imaging bulk-billing incentives and the latest $2 billion cuts in aged-care funding will directly impact on stroke victims and make their difficulties even greater. For Indigenous, remote and very remote Australians, who are already much more likely to suffer a stroke, the government's Medicare cuts will make their disadvantage even greater.

The motion, quite rightly, refers to regular health checks, which, of course, may prevent strokes. However, efforts to reduce strokes by encouraging more visits to general practitioners, who, in turn, will require more frequent pathology or diagnostic imaging tests, will not be effective if, at the same time, all of those costs are going to be pushed up. People will simply not take the preventive measures that they otherwise should, because they may not be able to afford to do so. Going back to my earlier comments that stroke affects more people in low socioeconomic areas, then those are the people that are least likely to go for more regular health checks if the costs have already been pushed up.

Likewise, when a stroke does occur, limiting access to allied health providers such as physiotherapists and speech pathologists by cutting aged-care funding programs will be detrimental to recovery efforts. During my time in this place, there has been a bipartisan approach to reducing the incidence of stroke across Australia, and there has been bipartisan agreement that prevention is the best objective. But we will not be able to prevent stroke if we increase the very costs that we are asking people to incur in order to keep regular checks on their health, which is exactly what this government is doing. My view is that the best thing we can do to prevent stroke is ensure that people can afford to see their doctor in the first place.

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