I want to commend the member for Bonner for bringing forward this motion about sun protection and the dangers of melanoma. It has my full support for its intent. Some issues in this place should be above the political divide, and this certainly is one. Deputy Speaker, I'm going to ask you to do something unusual when you get home tonight, and that is take your shoes off, take your socks off, and check under your feet. And I'll tell you why. My father and I, when I was a teenager, loved to play squash together. We would do it most weekends. After one game he came off the court and took his Dunlop Volleys off, and one of his white socks was covered in blood. He wasn't aware, but it was a melanoma. The irony of that was that he was the town's GP and had spent the best part of 30 years telling people to cover up, operating on people, taking out melanomas and basically urging them to live well and better. And he had absolutely no idea that he had this melanoma under his foot. So, over many, many months, after operations and skin grafts, unfortunately, he passed away at 59.

He didn't drink, didn't smoke and lived a good life. Hopefully, that means I'm going to live a very long time. But it doesn't discriminate. You can be healthy. You don't have to be old. You don't have to have baked yourself in your younger years. I do caution younger people to listen to the advice now. We know what the sun does. I was very happy the other day. My son came home—he's an apprentice carpenter—and he grumbled, 'We're not allowed to take our shirts off at work anymore.' And I said, 'Good, because, one, it looks more professional, and, two, you won't get cancer.' So the message still isn't getting out to the young people.

But it is very, very promising that this funding has come forward, and, as I said, this is above politics. This should be bipartisan across the board. It's great to see that there's $15 million dedicated to skin cancer prevention campaigns—young people, listen up—and the $10.3 million to accelerate development of a national targeted skin cancer screening roadmap. There's always more to be done. There are more worthy advancements to invest in to protect people from melanoma. Just yesterday, we saw reports on the personalised therapeutic cancer vaccine reducing the risk or recurrence of death by 42 per cent. That is just incredible.

I want to give a special shout-out to the Australian Skin Cancer Foundation for launching its successful skin check trucks in 2023 and, most recently, in December, the 3D skin check clinic, featuring the biopsy room and the VECTRA WB360 technology. As regional MPs, we know that it can be extremely difficult for regional and remote people to actually get access to check-ups, so it's great to see a van driving around. I'd love to see as many vans as there are the breast care clinic vans getting around Australia. We need them because it is a killer. There have been 17,000 diagnoses this year alone, and one life is one too many. I lost my father; a town lost their doctor. It is incumbent on all of us—parents and young ones—to make sure that we listen to the advice and that we get regular check-ups. In fact, I've got a regular check-up on Friday week for that very thing. I urge everybody to go out and do that.

Briefly, I'd like to thank and commend Cancer Council Australia in my region for the work that they do.