Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

World Diabetes Day was on 14 November, when numerous events drawing attention to the impact of diabetes were held around the country. But our focus on finding a cure and providing support for people affected by diabetes should not be limited to one day a year. In recent times I've been contacted by the McLeod family in my area, and I've met Damian McLeod and his seven-year-old son Julian, who suffers from type 1 diabetes. Julian, with his two younger siblings, is participating in the environmental determinants of autoimmunity trial. He has also become the face of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation's Christmas donation appeal also. From the day he was born, Julian has lived with and suffered the setbacks of type 1 diabetes, as have his parents and now his siblings. Continuous glucose monitoring has made life much better for him, but much more research is needed, and that, of course, requires funding.

Type 1 diabetes affects 120,000 people in Australia. Estimates are that almost 6,400 children up to 14 years of age had type 1 diabetes in 2016. For every 100 people who have type 1 diabetes, 95 will develop eye problems, 50 will have nervous system damage and 40 will have kidney damage. Those figures highlight why we should continue our search to find a cure and why lifting national funding for diabetes research is so important.