Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have the great privilege to speak tonight on an issue which is close to my heart. It is a critical issue for society and one that we can do something about. I want to talk about type 2 diabetes and the impact it has not only on individuals and their families but also on communities and on governments through health budgets. I also want to mention briefly the other form of diabetes, type 1 diabetes, which is non-lifestyle related and can affect people from all walks of life. It has a profound impact on the lives of young people.

There is no question that diabetes is on the rise and on the rise in a very dramatic way. I am not too sure how well understood diabetes is in the community or just how big a problem it is. In its simplest form, diabetes involves a problem with the production of insulin—the body does not produce enough insulin or there is inactivity in insulin production, which moderates the glucose sugar levels within the blood. High glucose levels that result in defective insulin production cause these problems.

Diabetes is now one of the leading chronic diseases affecting Australians—over 700,000 Australians, or about 3.6 per cent of the Australian population, according to data from 2005. We know from current surveys and studies that that number is increasing, and it is increasing each and every year. It is actually growing as a problem. Some of the data and statistics are quite frightening. The prevalence and diagnoses of diabetes have more than doubled since the early 1990s, when around 250,000 Australians were affected. There has been an enormous increase in the number of people diagnosed with diabetes. It is not so much a case of increased diagnosis but increasing numbers. It is now being termed an epidemic and has led to a great concern about people’s individual health repercussions. As I said earlier, it has wider social consequences and a massive impact on people’s lives.

Diabetes accounted for around five per cent of the disease burden in 2003 alone, and diabetes related hospitalisation rose by about 35 per cent between the years 2001 and 2005. These are serious numbers and this is a serious issue. While many members of parliament talk about the issues surrounding diabetes, I do not know that, collectively, we are doing enough to deal with what is shaping up to be one of Australia’s largest health problems in the coming decade.

While type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes—in fact, it accounts for about 83 per cent of all cases—it is largely preventable and that is why I want to talk about it tonight. It is a lifestyle problem, and I think that surrounding the issue of its preventability is that people generally do not quite understand how it comes about, what it is and how it impacts their lives. People can actually go blind, they can have incredible ulcers, they can have problems with blood circulation, and in fact they can lose limbs as a result of diabetes. So these are very serious issues. Diabetes is directly related to obesity, particularly in people who are over 40 years of age. As people get older it becomes more and more of an issue.

Quite frighteningly, diabetes is markedly on the rise in young people and in children. We see that more and more today. In fact, this week we are quite privileged to have in the building a whole range of young people with diabetes from all over Australia. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will be hosting members of parliament and senators, and they will be talking about the issues surrounding diabetes. There is a young ambassador from my electorate, Lucy Bedford, who has type 1 diabetes. She will be visiting me and talking to me and other people in the parliament about what diabetes means to her. For her it is not preventable; it is something that she has and that she has to deal with. It impacts not only on her health but also on her family’s health with respect to their ability to deal with this very debilitating condition.

I look forward to that event at the end of the week, and I know that other members of parliament will be getting involved as well. It is a really big deal for this parliament to be able to meet with these young ambassadors, some as young as eight or nine years of age, talking about how they cope on a daily basis with having to inject insulin to make it through the day. It is quite a serious issue.

I also want to raise something that I spoke about in the House briefly last week, and that is a report entitled Analysis of diabetes in the western region of Melbourne. I do not want to pick on Melbourne or Victoria; it just happens that that is where this particular study was done, and I think it is reflective of what is happening in other parts of Australia. The report looks at particular socioeconomic groups and regions and the instance of diabetes in those areas. There is no doubt from this analysis—and some people might have guessed this—that the worst cases of adult-onset or type 2 diabetes are in low-socioeconomic areas. There is a direct correlation. The lower the socioeconomic area, the poorer people are, the greater the link with either obesity or type 2 diabetes. I think that this is something that we as a parliament and a government ought to focus more attention on to look at ways that we can prevent it. It can be done in a range of ways including through education, informing people about how it comes about and about how lifestyle choices can make a very big difference.

I have some very good data on how to prevent this disease. In fact, some very good work on this area has been done by a young man, Hugh Bachmann, who is in the chamber today. He is here doing an internship and looking at a range of issues. He has done some work for me and he will be writing a paper on diabetes and food and all the other related issues. I am very much looking forward to the work that he is doing. Hugh found me some statistics on some of the small changes that we can make to our lifestyle today that can have a very big impact. For example, a small weight loss of between five and seven per cent of body weight can make a really big difference to whether or not we get type 2 diabetes. Moderate physical activity—getting out and about—of 150 minutes a week, which is 2½ hours a week, can also make a really big difference. Then there is reducing our fat intake. We would probably just make the assumption that if we did these things it would help, but the reality is and the evidence shows that they do actually work; they do actually help.

I thought, too, that it is important in the short period of time that I have tonight to also talk about the way our lives and communities have changed. There is no question that we are less active today than we used to be 30 or 40 years ago and that children play less now in the sense of physical activity than they used to. They do not ride their bikes to school, for example. That is a much less common activity these days. Our communities are very isolated in many respects and do not promote physical activity or people getting out and about. I know that there has been a change. There has been the release of the Major Cities Unit report and also the Sustainable Cities reports. We are only now tuning into what federal, state and local governments can do to create active communities and to start getting people back into doing some basic things. I hate the cliche ‘back to basics’ but in many ways it is about making small lifestyle choices such as eating more fruit and vegetables. It is about the simple things in life like going for a walk or getting the kids to ride to school or maybe the park—a range of things. These small things, along with active communities, can make the world of difference not so much to how long people live but to their quality of life. They can also make a difference to the amount of effort and resources and the budgets that are diverted away from very serious chronic diseases and illnesses that are not preventable to diseases that are preventable.

I would encourage people to pay more attention to these issues and to how they can do something to change. What I am saying here tonight is that I am going to do everything that I can within my electorate to promote a campaign to get people to understand (a) just what it is (b) what they can do about it and (c) how simple it is to make the key lifestyle changes that can make an enormous difference to their life and also to the capacity of governments to provide in the health area. (Time expired)