Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak in support of this motion and congratulate the member for Goldstein for moving it. HIV does not discriminate; people do. As UNAIDS has said:

Stigma and discrimination will continue to exist so long as societies as a whole continue to judge people with HIV.

And it could be said that stigma and discrimination will continue to exist so long as societies as a whole continue to judge anyone who is different.

As speakers before me have said, Australia was at the forefront of a bold, innovative public health approach to combating HIV-AIDS. As someone who grew up in the eighties, I remember, even as a young girl in country New South Wales, the fear that society had about people who had HIV-AIDS and I remember the public health campaigns telling people that it could happen to anyone and it wasn't just gay men who were susceptible to catching HIV and developing AIDS. We are rightly proud in Australia of the fact that we took the advice of scientists, we took the advice of people living with the fear and living with the risk of catching the disease and we devised a public health strategy.

Australia's national theme for World AIDS Day 2020 is Now More Than Ever. Now more than ever, we need to continue to focus on the science, to listen to the advocates and to make sure that we continue to work to eliminate stigma and discrimination and that we don't take our eye off the ultimate goal, and that is eliminating HIV-AIDS from society. UNAIDS's theme for World AIDS Day 2020 is Global Solidarity, Shared Responsibility. It's a theme that really reflects 2020 as a whole. UNAIDS leads the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat and has a goal of doing so by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. The idea is to stop new infections; to make sure that everyone living with HIV has access to HIV treatment; and to protect and promote human rights, because fundamental to the public health approach started in the eighties and continuing today is an acknowledgement of human rights—people's right to access health care, no matter who they are or where they live. UNAIDS also focuses on producing data for decision-making because, as I've said, HIV can affect anyone.

UNAIDS has an approach of prevailing against pandemics by putting people at the centre. We've seen how that approach has also been adopted in dealing with COVID-19 in many—not all, but many—countries around the world, putting people at the centre, putting public health at the centre of a response. So UNAIDS is calling on countries to make greater investments in global pandemic responses and to adopt a new set of bold, ambitious but achievable HIV targets. I hark back to the fact that Australia took a bold and ambitious public health approach in the 1980s with the advice of Bill Bowtell AO, who is still out there pushing scientific responses to epidemics. That's the approach that UNAIDS is calling on countries to do now. It wants us to set targets and then work to meet those targets.

Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAIDS, has said:

The collective failure to invest sufficiently in comprehensive, rights-based, people-centred HIV responses has come at a terrible price … Implementing just the most politically palatable programmes will not turn the tide against COVID-19 or end AIDS. To get the global response back on track will require putting people first and tackling the inequalities on which epidemics thrive.

We have seen in Australia that COVID-19 has thrived on inequality. We must continue to listen to scientists, to put people at the heart of public health campaigns, to believe in and support human rights and to end inequalities. That is the formula for dealing with issues such as HIV and COVID-19.

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