Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to join my colleagues and previous speakers in supporting the member for Leichhardt's motion on this really important issue around tuberculosis. The member for Higgins is correct, she and I, and others, travelled to Papua New Guinea in 2019. We went to the Port Moresby General Hospital. We actually went to the children's TB ward in Port Moresby general. While the member for Higgins has spent a career and a lifetime in the medical profession and has spent a lot of time in hospitals, for me it was a visit that I'll never ever forget. Walking in to Port Moresby general was pretty confronting. It was basically the size of a basketball court, with bed after bed after bed of children who had contracted tuberculosis, and many of them drug-resistant tuberculosis. To see the efforts and the struggle that many of them had to go through over time was pretty heartbreaking. Some of those children had been in that ward for almost 12 months. That is a long time to get better. It is a long time to stay in one spot. It is a long journey to recover from this awful disease. I think one of the most devastating parts of tuberculosis is that it is preventable and it is curable. While these young children were forced to stay on this really difficult regime of medical treatment, many children never make it to Port Moresby General Hospital, many children never make it to that level of care and many children never make it.

Australia is doing good work. Australia is doing good work in Papua New Guinea and the more the better in this case. I don't think that we should rest on what we've done but continue to partner with our friends and family in Papua New Guinea, in other parts of the Pacific and all across the world to bring an end to this awful, awful disease.

I want to take the rest of my time to also comment on the other looming health challenge that is presenting itself in Papua New Guinea at the moment and that is over the last fortnight we have seen a spike in coronavirus cases in Papua New Guinea. To give you a sense of the scale of the issue—my friend Professor Brendan Crabb, from the Burnet Institute, has written a piece for The Conversation in the last 24 hours going through some of the issues—Papua New Guinea has only conducted 55,000 tests since the start of this pandemic. In Victoria alone, we've conducted over five million tests. That gives you a sense of the scale of the testing that's going on in Papua New Guinea. Seventeen per cent of those 55,000 tests are coming back positive. There is a massive shortage of testing going on, and the percentage of people who are testing positive for the coronavirus is extraordinary. This is far more widespread than what is being reported—and it is on our doorstep.

As we have seen in the UK, Brazil, California and South Africa, where the coronavirus is allowed to spread it then forms mutations. The last thing we want to see on our doorstep is the devastation of the coronavirus in our own backyard, for our friends and family in Papua New Guinea, and another mutation of this virus in numbers that are inconceivable—and, to be frank, we don't even know the full extent of them.

Professor Crabb mention that we have committed to the COVAX program, which is good, but there really is more that we need to do. The remoteness of Papua New Guinea and the remoteness of the population means vaccinating people is a huge logistical challenge. We are already seeing in Australia the difficulty of the logistics of rolling out hundreds of thousands of vaccines. In Papua New Guinea, that difficulty is multiplied tenfold. We need to be providing more PPE to people. We need to make sure the Papua New Guineans are armed with the best and most sophisticated information to help them. Most of all, we need to stand with them and help them through this really difficult time and this awful health crisis.

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