Sam Lim (Tangney, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 will establish the Australian Centre for Disease Control, the CDC. This delivers on a commitment made by the Albanese Labor government to Australians: to establish a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control. Before we came to government, Australia was the only OECD country without a CDC equivalent. We saw highlighted in the Commonwealth Government COVID-19 Response Inquiry that Australia wasn't prepared for a pandemic.

There is much support for the establishment of an Australian CDC. Many consumers and health peak bodies, as well as infectious disease experts and researchers, support the establishment of an Australian CDC. I have spoken with researchers in my electorate of Tangney who are also in support of establishing an Australian CDC.

I support the establishment of an Australian CDC in part due to my own experiences working on the COVID-19 response. I was working as a frontline police officer with the WA Police Force when COVID-19 happened. Because of my connections with Perth multicultural communities and my different language skills, I was tasked to work on the Western Australian COVID-19 response. At the time, we were facing low vaccination rates, especially in many of the multicultural communities, because people were scared and confused. They did not have the correct information from a single, independent and transparent voice. Misinformation was everywhere, and it was especially challenging for multicultural communities. Some communities believed the misinformation and were refusing to get vaccinated as it went against their beliefs. I helped translate correct information into different languages and then I worked to disseminate information about the importance of getting vaccinated. I had the trust of the grassroots organisations, and so, together with some very good colleagues, we worked to get the message out. As a result of the combined effort of the WA Police Force, Health and government, we increased the vaccination rate from less than 50 per cent to almost 80 per cent and then improved it again to 90 per cent. Our work involved providing the correct information. We explained the evidence based information and we worked closely with the communities to make sure people understood the health advice about vaccinations.

Our small team was called the 'COVID vaccine command' and it was led by the then police commissioner, now our governor of WA. He tasked my very good friend Inspector Don Emanuel-Smith and I to be in his team to fight the misinformation and people's fear of coming forward to get vaccinated. Everywhere I went, I dragged my good supervisor, Inspector Don Emanuel-Smith, with me, and the two of us did a lot of multicultural outreach in WA. Our outreach effort included working with community places, such as the mosques, the temples, the churches, the gurdwaras, the community centres and the peak body associations, and sharing the latest medical advice and the importance of vaccination. We listened to the concerns of the community and helped them understand the accurate information that was based on health advice and from sources they could trust. We spoke to them in their languages and we tried to allay their fears. We brought doctors and nurses directly to the communities. I'm proud that these efforts made a positive contribution to protect the health and welfare of people being harmed by COVID.

On the front line, we were working very hard. It also felt like we were working fast, but this was because we were playing catch-up. Because of the lack of planning, Australia's pandemic response to COVID was extremely slow and confused and lacked authority. An Australian CDC can help change this, and it will help us improve our preparedness. This bill will establish the Australian CDC in legislation to deliver its functions related to a broad range of public health matters. This includes preventing communicable disease spread, providing independent advice on public health risks, strengthening data and analytics capability, and building its role as a trusted adviser to all governments on public health risks and threats. The Australian CDC will provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory government health agencies, international agencies—for example, the World Health Organization—and specialist non-government health organisations as well. It will be an authoritative source of public health advice and information for the public and for government officials working in public health. An Australian CDC will help strengthen Australia's public health capability and ultimately how we can look after all Australians.

When I reflect on my time working on the COVID response, I see that some of the difficulties we had were due to the lack of authority. People felt they didn't have an authoritative voice to trust, so they were listening to different people telling them different pieces of information. People didn't know what information was correct, and they didn't know who to turn to. This led to confusion and misinformation that spread like wildfire.

Combined with other barriers, these challenges were especially difficult to solve for culturally and linguistically diverse communities. We did solve them, but I think, had we had a trusted voice like what is being proposed with the Australian CDC, that this would have been easier, faster and more effective. It took a lot of work to provide people with the correct information that was based on evidence and data. It required my colleagues and me to work closely with multicultural communities where we had already built trust and established a good bond. Only then would people listen to what we were saying. It required a lot of effort to persuade people to listen to the health advice. This is why I believe having a trusted, independent authority will make a difference.

An Australian CDC will help combat some of the confusion and provide that authority that we need. It will help support confidence. While my focus during the COVID-19 response was on multicultural communities, I believe many other communities and disadvantaged groups of people could have also benefited from having this trusted voice. An Australian CDC will also support the better use of data and provide greater transparency of advice provided to the governments. Australia has great expertise and great talents to do this important work.

I also want to speak a little bit about the Australian National Phenome Centre, which is in my electorate of Tangney. This centre was established in 2019 and is linked to Murdoch University, which is also in my electorate of Tangney. I was recently at the Phenome Centre, where I learned more about the centre's current work, including the world-leading work it did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shortly after it was established, the Phenome Centre was deployed to study COVID-19. It generated important work in COVID-19, including being one of the first groups in the world to recognise COVID-19 as a multisystem inflammatory disease. This was done through the deep phenotyping of patient samples, some of which were collected from Fiona Stanley Hospital. The centre collaborated with other universities on world-leading studies to better understand the virus and conducted research into the effects of long COVID.

The centre is also committed to public health and solving problems of global significance. The centre is one of the best equipped metabolic laboratories in the world, and, on my recent visit, I saw some of the ultrahigh-resolution instruments for precision medicine and personalised health research. I also learned about the centre's focus on animal health diseases and zoonotic diseases, which forms part of the university's holistic view of looking at diseases, and their approach to infectious disease surveillance, management and control.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 will establish the Australian CDC, to commence operation in just a few months, on 1 January 2026. It will be an independent Commonwealth statutory agency. Establishing the Australian CDC in such a way will ensure it remains independent and cannot be subjected to direction from ministers or government departments. My experience of working with multicultural communities shows that this independence is very important.

The establishment of the Australian CDC will ensure that we are prepared and can better protect the health and wellbeing of all Australians. As I mentioned earlier, our hard work did manage to improve vaccination rates during COVID-19. However, I believe that, had we been better prepared from the beginning, our outreach work would have been much easier to deploy. The Australian CDC's functions are expected to expand in the future and will respond to emerging public health risks. As someone who was on the frontline of the COVID-19 response and as someone who every day fought to combat misinformation, I believe establishing the Australian CDC is very important and crucial. I am proud to support this bill and be part of an Albanese Labor government that is delivering on its commitment to a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control.

Debate adjourned.

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