Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens have long been calling for the establishment of a well funded CDC, and we will be supporting this legislation in the House. However, there are some improvements that we believe could be made. We'd like to see the CDC have an increased scope and funding so that it can be well prepared to support our Australian community for chronic diseases.

The ongoing inquiry into this bill has clearly highlighted that the exclusion of chronic diseases is an omission, and its inclusion would provide great benefits to our community. We acknowledge that the minister in his second reading speech flagged the possibility of expanding the CDC's scope to include chronic disease after a later review, but we don't believe that that's good enough. The CDC should include non-communicable and chronic diseases in its remit from the beginning.

Further, the inquiry into this bill has uncovered a range of good ideas that, if implemented, would ensure that the community can have a high degree of trust in the CDC, including, as previous speakers have mentioned, strengthening transparency, governance and independence. The Greens will be seeking to support amendments that ensure our community can have trust in the CDC.

Additionally, the Greens are very pleased to see that there is a focus within the CDC legislation on First Nations health care and addressing the inequalities that exist. We're pleased that at least one member of the advisory council will be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander so that lived experience is included in the advice to the director-general. It's absolutely vital that the Centre for Disease Control and the advice that it provides reflect the diversity and lived experience of our community, and it's concerning that the legislation does not mention disability once. The Greens believe that disability health is an important subsection of public health and should be recognised as a public health matter in the bill.

One of the reasons this CDC is so needed is the constant undermining and privatisation of our so-called universal public health system. We see it with the private health insurance industry, propped up by government subsidies as competitors to the government's own system. Government subsidies are actually supporting these competitors to the government's own public health system. We also see the effects of that with privatisation of our public assets like CSL, which now posts huge profits for its shareholders every year. They sold Australia off for a song. Labor sold off CSL in the nineties for $300 million. The company is now worth $100 billion, and last year it made $5 billion in profit—with no tax paid, by the way. Those who were in the know enough at the time to pick up some shares when they were initially sold in 1994 have profited absolutely enormously. They've made their money back 500 times over. For comparison, the same figure for the Commonwealth Bank, also privatised by the Keating Labor government, is 50. Imagine what we could have had if CSL were still in public hands—a publicly owned pharmaceutical manufacturer working in the interests of everyday Australians, not its shareholders. This privatisation might be the absolute worst deal in Australian history. I don't want to undermine the importance of the services that CSL provides. We know they're so critical, and we saw that during the pandemic. But the profit motive will always fundamentally conflict with the need to provide the best possible health care to all Australians. We absolutely must keep essential services in public hands.

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