Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I follow the member for Macarthur on such an important issue and after such an important contribution, as it is from a singular perspective in this House, I believe, in terms of his work in paediatrics and the insight he brings with him. I join him in commending the Australian Immunisation Register and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2017, and I am pleased to speak in support of this bill. It is work that I think needs to be absolutely bipartisan because of its critical factors.

I want to speak particularly about the electorate that I represent, the electorate of Lalor. There's been much talk about immunisation rates, and a tendency to think that it is inner-city middle-class people turning away from immunisation. I speak from the other end of that perspective. I speak for a community where there are 5½ thousand people who have not had their childhood immunisation programs completed. I speak for a community where 30 per cent of our four-year-olds do not attend childcare or education. I speak for a community where many young families may not be connected to a general practitioner, one that they see repeatedly, and may not necessarily be connected to the kind of maternal and child healthcare opportunities that I had when my children were young in that community. These are really important matters. These children will get to the school gate, but No Jab, No Pay for childcare will not have an impact.

In a community like mine, we need to spend an enormous amount of money on education about immunisation. We need to ensure that this message is reaching everyone. So, while I celebrate today that we are here and we have a long speaking list—and that pleases me too because we are shining a light on this very important issue—and while the No Jab, No Pay regime in Victoria is improving outcomes and continually shining a light on this, I still feel that there is so much more to be done.

I have sat with the anti-vaxxers that the member for Macarthur referenced. They are more likely to be middle class and more likely to be educated, but more likely to be completely and utterly naive about this issue. They are unaware of Australia's great history in this space. And they are afraid because, through their self-education—through the internet—they tell me they believe that immunisation is some kind of campaign by big pharmacology, when in fact immunisation has come from the groundswell of generations past to prevent the kinds of losses that they saw.

I listened to the member for Boothby earlier about her coming in contact with whooping cough and then being a sufferer of whooping cough. I am a mother of a young family, with three sons under five. My eldest contracted whooping cough at school. My mother, who was then in her 70s, recognised the cough in its very early stages and immediately said, 'Joanne, your boy has whooping cough.' It is a communicable disease. He had picked it up at school. He had been vaccinated, but it had broken through his defences. In a large family, with seven siblings and lots of babies, this meant complete isolation for my family. It meant that my son, who was in his first year of school, missed eight weeks of school. The costs go beyond those things. I had the value of a mother who had lived through babes-in-arms dying from whooping cough and who could clearly explain to me the dangers for an infant who was not yet walking. I had a GP who could reassure me very quickly that, because he was on his feet and five years of age, whooping cough would not have a dramatic impact on him, but the danger was there for the tiny infant.

What I see in my community is some ignorance of those who are new arrivals to our country who do not have a history of immunisation; that is an education profile. Some middle-class people or people who have taken it upon themselves to determine that they don't want their child vaccinated ignore the statistics and the need for the herd levels of vaccination. I have sat with some of these people and spoken to them. My take, when I am in conversation with them, is that we have a generational disjoint here, because they haven't seen the deaths. They haven't seen the pain. They haven't seen the tragedies firsthand. I tell them about my son having whooping cough and what that might have meant. I tell them about a very good friend of mine who had been exposed to rubella while pregnant and her deaf child and the impact that this has had on their family. It was another child who was carrying the measles virus which led to that. I tell them about my father, who had polio as a child. I tell them about my Uncle John, who had tuberculosis. He spent many months in a sanatorium as a young man and was lucky to survive the ordeal.

If you share these stories about the past and what immunisation has done to change that situation, people do come on board. As a mother—and I note the member for Hotham has just joined us; I know that she will be going through this as a mother of young children—you do not wake up in the morning and say: 'Yippee, it's immunisation day. I can't wait to take my child for a vaccine injection.' Nobody feels like that. Everybody has some trepidation about this process. It's through our families, through our mothers—dare I say it, through our paediatricians and through our GPs that we do these things, because we are doing it for the good of all. Yes, we all feel some trepidation, but we must continue to immunise our children to protect them and other children; it is to protect one another. So I am a firm believer that this legislation not only is important but requires absolute support from people across the chamber. Like others, I was incredibly disappointed to see Senator Hanson's recent comments. I was also disappointed that they were not immediately condemned across this chamber. That's how important this issue is. Speaking as someone from an electorate where we have high rates of people who are not immunising, I understand the risk, because the risk is there for all of the children in my community. I call on the federal government to do more. I have sat with health stakeholders who have harked back to the past, to the Victorian model, when we had the child maternal healthcare units—the old caravan at the kindergarten. This was where we went to get support and have our children immunised. This was where mums were supported through the feeding process and where our babies were weighed monthly. I was someone who had their children while those things were available. I was given support through food and allergy grading. We heard again in the news this week about the allergy rates of children in Australia and the importance of going through the processes in a carefully staged way in order to get those numbers down. So I see the importance of a stick and carrot.

I am concerned that we are not doing enough in education and on how we might rebuild an educative process that supports parents through these processes and ensures that there are good health outcomes for our children. I think it is a space where we could hear a lot from older generations. We could hear stories from paediatricians. We could hear stories from people like my mother who held babes in arms who were lost to whooping cough a long, long time ago. They could share those stories in our new technologically enhanced ways and make sure that everybody is hearing this message about vaccination.

I would stress, as did the member for Macarthur, the importance of carrying the message to the community that this is an area where Australia has led the way—to de-Americanise, if you like, this debate that's going on to ensure that people understand that this work is something where we have led and where we have trusted our scientists for several generations to see us through.

Having sat with people who are very concerned and are acting from a position of concern for their child that they perceive already has immunological difficulties, I welcome the extension to other professionals in providing exemptions. I encourage all those who feel trepidation in these spaces to ensure that they connect with their general practitioners and be talked through the issues and to please listen to the science.

This is a very important piece of legislation. It adds to what is happening in some states and, I am very proud to say, in the state of Victoria, where much of this work is being done. I can say here that I know there are 5,500 unvaccinated people in my electorate because of some of the work in Victoria where we are doing a much better job of monitoring vaccination processes. I think that is really important. This legislation does some important things.

I will take a moment to acknowledge the member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, and his very high-profile stance on this in an electorate that, like mine, has high rates of people not immunising. I was really pleased to see him on the front page of our Melbourne newspapers, carrying that very strong message with his small infant and his partner, encouraging people to ensure they have their immunisations completed.

I will share in closing that when I was a member of a school community as an assistant principal at a school in Melbourne's west I took the phone call at our school that said that we had a case of meningococcal in a student. I would take this opportunity to say that if you are the person who has to tell 1,200 families that there is a communicable disease within your cohort of young people, aged between 11 and 18, watching parents' faces absolutely brings home to you the importance of immunisation like nothing else does. I would say to anyone who is worrying about immunisation, if you were in that school that day, if you'd received that letter, you would've been with every other family lining up at a doctor to get immunised and get immunised quickly. It is a terrifying thing to think that you have been close to a disease that can be as tragic as that. We had a very positive outcome in our school. The student that had come into contact with and contracted that illness rejoined us in the classroom in a fairly short time after receiving treatment, but I know as a whole community how lucky we felt for his family and how lucky we felt that there was only one incident and that there were no other children affected. I know after that incident in my community that there were a lot of families who then began to talk about immunisation, and I hope that that single circumstance may have led to others going to be immunised.

But with 5,500 people in my community who have not been immunised and children not attending kindergarten or childcare centres necessarily—30 per cent of our four-year-olds—this is a critical matter. I would urge government, both federal and state, to think about what we are going to do as a next step for those families when they reach the school gate and how we are going to reverse that. I do not suggest in any way that that's part of an anti-vaccination movement. It is more a matter of education and education around public health: connecting people with general practitioners and ensuring that all of the adults in our community are well and truly aware of both the processes and the vaccinations and their importance, and that they understand vaccination processes and the good they do for public health.

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