Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. This could start a little bit from left field because I am not a doctor. Sporting coaches are strange. They say stuff like, 'Preparing to fail is failing to prepare,' and reverse it. I had one coach who really liked General Patton, so all around our locker room was his favourite quote, which was: 'I would rather sweat than bleed. You are better off sweating in peacetime so that you don't bleed in war.' It seemed a bit dramatic for under-19s basketball, but here we are.

But they were right. What they were getting at is that, in sport, you see two hours on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon at the pub, a mate's place or with the family, but you don't see the hours and hours of preparation—the 15 to 30 hours that the players have spent on the training track or the hundreds of hours that have been done in the film room by scouts, coaches and videographers to make sure that the players are prepared.

You want to have the scout; the scout needs to be in. You want to know what you're doing. You want to know what they want to do. You don't want to be surprised—if I do this, they will do that; if I'm over here, they will go over there. And, most importantly, you need to know how to stop them.

This lesson translates as well in life, and, unfortunately, COVID-19 was a perfect example of this. It hit Australia and it hit the world hard. We were not prepared.

I was a sport and rec officer—deemed frontline. I had to try to navigate my way through chief health operation officers, deemings, the requirements. What does that look like for a sport? What sport can we still play? How do I contact trace? How do we sign people in? How do we sign people out? If tennis is okay, is squash okay? Is golf okay? Rugby League was probably out, but I didn't know. I wasn't prepared.

When the lockdowns happened and my children suddenly became homeschooled, I thought that I could just hand over the work sheet that I'd printed out for them from the school. It doesn't work that way with a grade 3 kid and a grade 5 kid. I couldn't do my work and teach them at the same time. It turns out I'm not a teacher either. I was not prepared. We were not prepared.

When the borders shut, the migrant workers stopped coming and tourism dried up almost immediately, the Cairns economy tanked. We had become so reliant on overseas work, a service based economy and a tourism based economy. We were not prepared. We didn't understand the scout. We didn't know what we were up against.

Chief health officers become recognised figures—probably something chief health officers don't want to do. They want to inform policy, help people stay safe and make sure the health system is working. They don't want to be on TV, generally speaking.

Federal, state and territory leaders had to get up every day and inform us on disease numbers and deaths. We had regular meetings right across the country, but everything was reactive. We had no preparation. We had no understanding of what this would look like. I remember sitting at home and getting ready to watch the Wildcats versus Sydney in the grand final—and Sydney forfeited. I couldn't believe it. In 20 years, I never got close to a grand final, but these guys, unsure of what the future was going to look like, made the decision to pull the plug. It was then I understood that it was serious—but always reactive.

In Australia we were spared the worst of it, a happy circumstance of the tyranny of distance and weather. We weren't inside, like some of my friends in New York, with ducted heating and ducted air conditioning, which spread the virus quickly. Friends of mine from the city would tell me that ice trucks were being used as makeshift morgues because everything was full. We were spared that, and we're lucky.

Our dedicated health workers drove themselves into the ground, the psychological scars of which are still current for them. They worked day and night to keep us all safe, and they did a fantastic job. But, I think, in hindsight we can all agree that we probably could have done a bit better in that response.

One of the glaring holes was, of course, that we hadn't trained. In the previous 12 years, we had not had one pandemic drill for what might happen to Australia, and this lack of planning meant that our response was slow and confused. In fact, when the Albanese Labor government was first elected, Australia was the only OECD country without a CDC or its equivalent. You've got to be prepared. The scouts are prepared; we weren't prepared.

The COVID-19 inquiry called for an Australian CDC, and that is what the Anthony Albanese Labor government is delivering. You'll be very glad to know that this will deliver on our commitment to deliver a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control. Science will drive the CDC.

The bill will establish this as a non-corporate Commonwealth entity, and, better yet, it starts very soon—1 January 2026. The body takes over from the interim CDC, which was established in 2023, to immediately improve the way we respond to health and emergencies. The Albanese Labor government has already run pandemic drills this term through Exercise Volare. This is about strengthening our biosecurity, making sure that we've got measures against things like avian flu, which has decimated chicken populations in the Northern Hemisphere and is actually killing seals in San Francisco—proving that it will mutate and move from species to species.

Under this bill the CDC will strengthen our public health capacity to improve our preparedness for future pandemics and safeguard health and wellbeing for all Australians and our wildlife. The CDC will have a broad range of functions on a range of public health matters, including preventing communicable diseases, providing independent advice on public health risks, strengthening data and analytics capabilities and building its role as a trusted adviser to governments on public health and safety risks. The analytics and the data are important. Knowledge is power. Understanding the spread of like viruses, knowing how they're going to react and understanding how to put stops in place to ensure that they don't get to our most vulnerable communities—I represent some of the most vulnerable communities in Australia.

When COVID hit, the cape looked down. You couldn't go north of Mossman; Yarrabah shut the road. So fearful were those communities of COVID-19 getting in there and wiping out the elders, that they cut themselves off completely from the outside world. We need to give our people assurances that that is not necessary. They need to know that we can protect them, and the CDC is a massive part of that. It'll provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory health organisations, international agencies, specialists and non-government health organisations. It is anticipated that this will be the authoritative source for public health advice. This will be where you go; this will be the source of truth for all public health officials and those working in the public health space.

Independence and integrity are essential to making sure that this works—which is why the CDC, through this bill, will ensure it remains completely independent and cannot be subjected to any kind of direction from ministers or government departments. Science will run this—not feelings, not thoughts and not ideologies but science. When COVID-19 hit us and the world got together and made a decision, a vaccine was created in under six months. That is a testament to the power of science and human ingenuity, and it shows us what we can do on a global scale when we put our minds to it. Science saves lives.

A single source of truth will be able to produce real data that can be trusted. Knowledge, as I said before, is power. And I think it's important to remind people that, while this bill and the creation of the CDC may seem like a reaction to COVID-19, it's not about COVID-19. We met that head on and came out okay—not great, but okay. This is about what comes next, because a part of the scout is looking back at what you've done, figuring out what went wrong and making sure that the plans are in place to not make those mistakes again—understanding the weaknesses, understanding the holes in your game and putting in the safeguards. Otherwise you're destined and doomed to create the same problems. This isn't about if; this is about when.

Our planet has a history of pandemics: Black Death, Spanish flu, Ebola, AIDS—all of which have devastating effects on communities. It is only a matter of time until we see another pandemic reach that kind of status—be it avian flu or another coronavirus, it's going to happen. So the sooner we start preparing and the sooner we start training, the better off we will be. But, beyond the global scale, the CDC will have real benefits for the people that I represent. In recent weeks there have been a number of measles outbreaks in Cairns. The contact tracing was second to none. They went through 2½ thousand people, they were able to isolate potential carriers and they kept my community safe.

The Cape has a range of diseases and STIs, some of them eradicated in what you consider mainstream Australia. I can guarantee you workers on the front line will take any kind of extra help and data they can get, because they are working themselves to the bone. A quick Google search of the infectious diseases currently running around Cape York include melioidosis, dengue, Ross River fever, tuberculosis, nontuberculous microbacteria infection and other diseases such as whooping cough, meningococcal and bloodborne viruses such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV and, recently, malaria, which was found in Lakeland. These are things which create an existential threat to the people of my electorate, and a centre for disease control can only help them.

Some of these diseases will only become more common with the impacts of climate change, and Australia isn't alone in dealing with the potential of pandemic. Papua New Guinea is our northernmost neighbour, which, as the Prime Minister said the other day you could swim across to from Saibai. You wouldn't, because there are things in there that will eat you. But you could! Tuberculosis runs rampant through PNG. Our nearest neighbour is suffering under the burden of a disease that was eradicated in the Western world in the 1940s. We have an obligation to protect our nearest neighbours, with whom we have an alliance, and to ensure that tuberculosis does not take a foothold in the most vulnerable parts of my electorate and our community.

A better coordinated approach will ensure that the people on the ground have what they need to protect our nation. The CDC is a national security issue. So, whether it's the health centres in Aurukun, Kowanyama or Lockhart River, whether it's our remote hospitals on Thursday Island, Weipa or Cooktown or whether it's our health centres in the Torres Strait, which deal with the treaty villages in PNG as they come across the strait there to get help at Saibai or Boigu, they all deserve our best foot forward in fighting these infectious diseases and for us to give our health professionals more tools. This will be a policy guided by experts—always. There is no place for any politician with no background in health to have a say and try to tell doctors and nurses what to do in this situation. They spend years studying this. They're experts; they're good at it. They swear an oath to protect us, and they will do so with these new abilities.

Whether it's vaccines, masks or any kind of pandemic response, we should listen to those who know what they're talking about. By having a strong and independent CDC, we can make sure that our professionals and experts on the front line fighting these pandemics have the authority, the data and the information to keep us safe. This is another example of Labor building a strong health system and assuring a bright future for my electorate. I commend the bill to the House.

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