Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support the Australian Immunisation Register and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 today because it does two very important things: it creates a new framework to establish and manage our national immunisation registers and it expands the scope of the two existing registers. The bill also furthers the government's strong commitment to the No Jab, No Pay program, which has lifted immunisation rates right across Australia. The bill before us will strengthen and galvanise our whole society's protection against measles, mumps, rubella, shingles and the scourge of whooping cough. These are all diseases which attack our most vulnerable, by which we mean the young, the sick and the elderly. We must keep these people safe from disease and their health as secure as possible. I strongly support this bill for several reasons. First, it makes sense for medical practitioners and patients to be able to easily track their vaccination record so that they can make sure they're up to date with their immunisations and don't have additional vaccinations when it's not necessary to do so. We shouldn't waste money and precious medical resources. In this data-driven age it makes sense to have a register of immunisation so that we're not reliant on pieces of paper to record our vaccination history. This means those who have to move regularly for work, for example, will not be so reliant on transferring records between their doctors or healthcare professionals. Second, and more importantly, we must protect the most vulnerable in our community. Our most vulnerable, in this instance, are babies and very young children, people who are not able to be immunised because of serious illness, or the elderly who may have compromised immune systems.

Unfortunately, I have a firsthand and quite terrifying experience of how important it is to protect our most vulnerable and how easily they can be put at risk, no matter how diligent and well-immunised you are. Back in 2009, despite being fully immunised, I was diagnosed with whooping cough. That year, South Australia was suffering a whooping cough epidemic. I was one of the 5,831 people who contracted the disease, despite having a normal and up-to-date vaccination record. My experience with whooping cough was not terrifying because I had the classic cough and couldn't breathe—my symptoms were quite the opposite: all I had was a runny nose and a mild cough—it was terrifying because the week before I was diagnosed, and before my symptoms became really noticeable, I had visited my brother, sister-in-law and my week-old niece. My family spent a very nervous few weeks waiting to see if my niece, who of course was too young to be immunised, developed any symptoms; thankfully, she did not.

This very close call reiterated to me the absolute importance of vaccination, but it also reiterated the importance of staying up to date with medical advice, which includes that expectant mothers, fathers and grandparents, and anyone else who will be in close contact with brand-new babies, or people with compromised immune systems, should have a new whooping cough vaccination. It is a particularly nasty disease that has a habit of mutating, so up-to-date immunisation is very important. By not vaccinating ourselves or those in our care, we risk not only our lives and theirs but the lives of others in the community. We have to protect the vulnerable, the young and the elderly, and we cannot take for granted these vaccines, which are the result of over a century of public health management and medical research.

We are so privileged to live in a world where we have come so close to eradicating diseases that have plagued humanity for much of our history. It wasn't long ago that our ancestors did not enjoy such safety. It wasn't long ago that polio was still rife in so many parts of the world. Thanks to the work of Rotary International and their partners, they have reduced polio cases by 99.9 per cent worldwide since their first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. Globally, there have been only eight reported cases of the wild poliovirus this year. It's a remarkable achievement.

As a proud member of the Rotary Club of Blackwood, I want to acknowledge the wonderful work of our president Garry Dolman, immediate past president Robyn Venus and all the work that the dedicated volunteers do week in, week out to raise money to eradicate this terrible and preventable disease globally. Their efforts are repeated by the 35,000-plus Rotary clubs around the world, and what a remarkable effort and achievement it has been to almost eradicate this terrible disease by immunisation.

It is not just whooping cough and polio that we need to protect against. It is other diseases like measles—a disease that, like polio, people of my generation don't really understand. If you do want to understand the devastating impact of measles, then read famous children's author Roald Dahl's 1986 essay on the death of his much-loved daughter, Olivia. She died at the age of seven in 1962, at a time when immunisations for measles were not reliable or readily available. He wrote:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything. 'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her. 'I feel all sleepy,' she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Later in the essay, he went on to say:

It is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised.

The coalition agrees with this sentiment. This is why, in 2015, we passed the Australian Immunisation Register Act, which created a new consolidated legislative framework for the establishment and ongoing maintenance of Australian immunisation.

The Immunisation Register, created by the coalition, complemented the policy by allowing parents and children over the age of 14 to see whether they meet their immunisation requirements. The register works in conjunction with the No Jab, No Pay policy, and is one of the mechanisms that has facilitated the climb of our vaccination rate from 90 per cent in September 2016 to 93 per cent now, and rates continue to climb. A rate of 95 per cent immunisation is considered the benchmark for stopping the spread of diseases, and that is what the government is working towards. For those with children covered by the No Jab, No Pay program, the vaccination rate sits just shy of this, at 94.5 per cent. It is a program of tough love, admittedly, but it is ultimately good public health policy that saves lives and protects lives. The coalition's No Jab, No Pay program has increased children's immunisations by an extra 200,000, making children's lives and those around them safer. Immunisation is the safest and most effective way of protecting against vaccine-preventable disease. In addition to creating a consolidated vaccination register and improving nationwide vaccination data capture, the Australian Immunisation Register, which came into effect on 1 January 2016, improved arrangements surrounding the medical exemption process, such that only general practitioners could assess for medical exemptions.

Since then, other specialists, including immunisation clinicians, have requested that other specialised medical professionals be allowed to conduct assessments for medical exemptions recognised under the act. Medical specialists have told of how sending patients back to general practitioners to get medical exemptions has unnecessarily added a burden for the time of both patients and practitioners, and unnecessary cost. This is why, in the interests of enhancing the effective No Jab, No Pay program, the government has introduced this bill, which will recognise other specialists as being able to provide medical exemptions. These specialists include paediatricians, public health physicians, infectious disease physicians and clinical immunologists. These changes will allow these specialists to provide a medical exemption through the Australian Immunisation Register. This will streamline the way individuals are assessed for a medical exemption, by including those medical practitioners. This will reduce the time taken for a small number of individuals who need to obtain this medical exemption from immunisation.

The willingness of the medical sector to consult and provide feedback on this vital policy shows they are primarily concerned with making this good policy work even better. Doctors, like the coalition government, understand the importance of a high vaccination rate in Australia. While the rate is climbing, we must keep working to see that those areas which lag behind catch up with the rest of the nation. A family's choice not to immunise their children is not supported by health, public health policy or medical research. If a dangerous disease is preventable, we must do all we can to reasonably stop it. The benefits to the broader community from high vaccination rates are too important to do nothing. We have to keep our most vulnerable, from babies through to the elderly, as safe and secure as possible.

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