Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services and Disability Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to continue my remarks on the Australian Immunisation Register and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2017. I do not want Australia to be a developed country which sees an innocent child crippled by polio or killed by whooping cough because of nonsense spruiked by unqualified wellness bloggers. In this modern Australia, we should be promoting the health of all people. We all want healthy, well-nourished children who are protected from the wrath of disease. We should encourage reason and therefore encourage the science behind immunisation. It is far, far removed from voodoo.

It upsets me to think that there are many parents in Australia who would even consider not immunising their young children—children whose lives can be cut short by preventable diseases like meningococcal, whooping cough, rubella, hepatitis and influenza. Why should a family with a newborn child too young to be immunised play Russian roulette with their child's life when they interact with others who may or may not have been immunised simply because of parental selfishness? Pause and think what it would be like to lose a son or a daughter because their little body did not have the immunity to a deadly disease. The eradications of smallpox and polio are directly attributed to successful vaccination programs. Perhaps vaccine scepticism will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and allow previously eradicated diseases to take hold again.

At this point I would like to put on record my congratulations to Rotary International for their relentless and determined campaign to eradicate polio. Consider that: polio, the disease which saw devastating effects in children well into the last century, is soon to be eradicated by effective immunisation regimes. Rotary began their fight against polio in 1979, with a project to immunise six million children in the Philippines. As of 2016 there were reportedly only 37 cases of polio worldwide. It shows that, with their determination, their target of eradicating polio by 2018 is within sight.

There are countries who, despite today's modern age of technology and medical advancements, still suffer from the complications of preventable diseases—countries which cannot keep up with the supply of vaccines to cater for the millions of people seeking immunisation, or remote places where the efficacy of a vaccine is undermined by storage. Thanks to the ingenious mind of Professor Mark Kendall, a Ryan electorate local, and his team at the University of Queensland this may be a thing of the past. For those members who are not aware, Professor Mark Kendall and his research team have developed a nanopatch technology to deliver vaccination, including the polio vaccine, through a needle-free technology. Professor Kendall's nanopatch is a very small square of silicone containing 20,000 microscopic spikes that deliver the vaccine directly to the skin's immune cells. Imagine a small patch, applied directly to your skin, that is painless, uses a fraction of the dosage and does not require refrigeration. Today we have a padded box with perhaps six syringes in it. But now we can deliver hundreds of these patches in a box. It can be dropped, it can be left on the deck and it doesn't have to be refrigerated. It can be delivered to villages. You don't need a medical practitioner to administer it, because it's delivered through a little suction pad. You can vaccinate or immunise whole villages in half a day with non-professionals. What a breakthrough that is for so many people around the world. This revolutionary design, I believe, will redefine the course of vaccination the world over.

It is no secret that the coalition takes vaccination very seriously. In fact, I accompanied the then Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Hon. Susan Ley, when she announced in 2015 the coalition government's $26 million Immunise Australia budget package in my very healthy electorate of Ryan, a budget package that back then was commended by medical professionals for assisting busy parents to keep their children's vaccinations up to date and dispel common myths about immunisation. Recently I came across a poignant remark from Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer for Time magazine. He said:

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

There is no place for petty politics. The health of Australians needs bipartisan support. Members of this parliament should be contributors, not inhibitors, to the health of Australians young and old. It is imperative for parents to be fully informed of the medical facts before they make what could be a life-or-death decision affecting their children and the children of others.

I remind members here today that vaccinations do not stop a childhood. They are vital to ensuring an individual's health, as well as the health of those around them. The coalition is committed to positive health outcomes through preventive measures like vaccination. To date, we have seen record rates of Australians immunised against preventable diseases, the likes of which were fatal in Australia less than 50 years ago. With this booster to immunisation, I commend the bill to the House.

Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I chose to speak on the Australian Immunisation Register and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 today because, like every member of this place, I receive regular representations from constituents who object to their children being immunised. I wanted to take the opportunity to make a very clear statement about my views and why I have some deep concerns about others who provide succour and comfort to those who would seek to peddle dangerous misinformation about the impact of our national vaccination program.

I am pleased to say that the group of objectors who approached me—and, I am sure, every other member of this place—is very, very small. Perhaps their concerns are heartfelt, but they are misinformed. To be clear, we do know that there are a very small number of people, a very small number of children, who are unable, because of their own medical complications, to safely receive an immunisation. This legislation and other pieces of legislation on this matter deal with those issues. But I would like to set out in a very clear and concise way why I believe it behoves every member of this place to support with full voice our national immunisation program.

Australia has a very long and proud history of vaccination and public health, stretching back to 1804, when the first smallpox vaccination was administered in an Australian colony. It is hard for us to imagine today a time when childhood deaths from disease—including measles, diphtheria and polio—were common. But I suspect most of us in this place will have a family member who can remember such a time. There are still two million to three million childhood deaths each year worldwide from vaccine-preventable diseases. We have made great progress but, like all progress, it is reversible.

We made great steps in Australia with the creation of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. CSL was established in 1916 to ensure that Australia could produce its own vaccines in the period of the Great War. Supplies of vaccines that we were dependent upon had been interrupted and there was great concern that the Australian health system was going to be at risk if we did not have the capacity to produce our own vaccines. It was the flu pandemic of 1918-19 that created the real impetus and the public support to turbocharge our vaccine program. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 25 per cent of the world population was infected with the Spanish flu. The death toll was estimated to be somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people internationally. In Australia, two million were infected, and somewhere between 12,500 and 15,000 Australians died. Quarantines were set up in towns throughout Australia; our hospital system was quite simply overwhelmed. A vaccination program and popular support for the vaccination program grew out of this national crisis.

It is quite true that tens of thousands of deaths of Australian children have been prevented during the 20th century because of our national vaccination program. We can look at a lot of common diseases. Take pertussis or whooping cough; there are regular outbreaks every two to three years of whooping cough. When vaccinations were introduced in 1940, notifications and deaths from whooping cough fell dramatically. Before the vaccination program was introduced, in the 10 years between 1936 and 1945, there were 1,700 deaths from whooping cough; 1,700 young children who lost their lives because of whooping cough. But, because of the vaccination program, less than one per year has died, on average, over the last 20 years.

But this is an area where there is no room for complacency, because we know, because of the reduction in herd immunity—in part—that notified rates of whooping cough are increasing in Australia despite high infant immunisation rates. From 2002 to 2008, there were between 5,000 and 10,000 notifications annually. Compare that with 30,000 per annum between 2009 and 2011. It just goes to highlight the point I am making; this is an area where we cannot be complacent.

In the area of polio, most Australians will have a family member who, if they are still alive today, is suffering from postpolio syndrome. Polio epidemics caused more than 1,000 deaths in Australia between 1946 and 1955. If you didn't die—if you survived—quite often you were left with life-crippling disabilities. That included some children who were ventilator dependent for the rest of their lives. Since the mid-1960s there have only been four deaths from polio in Australia, and there have been no notified cases of wild-type polio for more than 30 years. In fact, in the year 2000 Australia was declared polio free. In fact, Australia has been a very active participant in a worldwide campaign to eradicate polio. We joined up with the target of eradicating polio by 2018. We are well on track to reach this target, but we have to ensure that we do our own job in our own backyard by keeping herd immunity high.

In the area of measles, every two to three years there was an outbreak of measles. If you are a child of my generation, you probably caught measles and were confined to bed for a couple of weeks. Complications associated with measles often led, tragically, to a young child losing their life. In the 1980s and 1990s, measles outbreaks occurred again, intermittently, because the vaccine uptake—that is, people having their children vaccinated for measles infections—dropped again. That is another example where the introduction of a vaccine program has all but eradicated a disease, but, when we drop our guard and herd immunity drops, we see the rates jumping up again.

We could go through the examples of all the diseases which are a part of our national vaccine program and tell a similar story: deaths in the thousands in the early years of the last century, down to negligible levels today—a result of our national vaccine program. So I argue that the No Jab, No Pay policy is sound. The No Jab, No Play policy is also sound. In this country, it's not illegal to refuse vaccination, but it is reckless.

I have had people come to me and argue that they are being discriminated against, that they are being penalised and that they are having certain government benefits or access to certain services refused to them because they are exercising their free choice. They say they are being discriminated against because of that. Well, I simply make the point that benefits, like family tax benefit payments, don't fall from the sky. They're the result of a collective effort of Australians paying their taxes, which provide the revenue for these payments. Quite simply, you can't complain about not getting a collective benefit from the Australian people if you're unwilling to take a collective responsibility to the health and welfare of your fellow Australians, and that's what the national vaccine program is all about. It's about taking a collective responsibility to ensure the collective health and welfare of the Australian population. You cannot complain about the denial of a collective benefit if you are unwilling to participate in a collective responsibility.

We are rightly proud of our health system in Australia. We rightly compare ourselves to countries that don't have the benefits that we provide to our citizens. The national vaccination program is a part of it, and it is a responsibility of every member of this House and the other place to take every opportunity that is available to us to point out to the ill-informed objectors that not only are they wrong but using the platform available to them in this place to perpetuate those reckless mistruths is very, very dangerous, indeed. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.

Leave granted for second reading debate to resume at a later hour this day.