Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This year marks 30 years of Australia's Biggest Morning Tea. I joined more than one hundred people at the Biggest Morning Tea hosted in Mount Gambier late last month, which was one of more than 22,000 events held across the country. The Mount Gambier morning tea alone raised $5,000. A huge congratulations to Karen Petersen and the organising committee in Mount Gambier!

For those of us living in regional Australia, fighting cancer can be particularly challenging, as we don't have the access to the same treatment and services as our city cousins. It's one of the reasons the survival statistics differ between city and country. The further from a metropolitan centre a patient lives the more likely they are to die within five years of a cancer diagnosis.

With a population of around 65,000 people, the Limestone Coast has chemotherapy services situated in Mount Gambier, but we don't have radiation therapy, and many patients are forced to make a very difficult choice between travel for the treatment they need or going without it. Thirty per cent of the Australian population live in regional Australia, and 50 per cent will get cancer before the age of 85. It's no wonder that 14.2 per cent of Australian cancer patients who would benefit from radiation don't get access to it. Fighting cancer is hard enough, but for regional patients it's even harder.