Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Of course, new institutions and powers always invite scrutiny—rightly so. In supporting the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill, I want to acknowledge several legitimate concerns and show how legislation is structured to address them.

The CDC must be seen by the public as an independent, objective and evidence driven institution. The draft legislation includes: mandatory publication of advice and underlying evidence; an advisory committee appointed based on expertise to provide challenge and perspective, though without decision-making powers; and that at least one member of the advisory council be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, to ensure that First Nations perspectives are included. In short, transparency is baked into this legislation, not retrofitted.

Another concern is how data will be handled, particularly sensitive health information. This legislation ensures that the use, sharing and disclosure of data will be consistent with the Privacy Act and tightly controlled. The CDC cannot compel government entities to release data. The legislation explicitly prohibits any overreach, including data power grabs. Protected information under the CDC Act is exempt from freedom-of-information requests under the FOI amendments in this bill.

An institution without resources is just an aspiration; it's not a reality. The Australian Medical Association has welcomed this legislation but emphasised the importance of sustained funding and expert leadership for the CDC to command credibility. The Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases has also endorsed this bill and called for continued support and partnership with the research and clinical community. Thus we must commit not only to the passing of this legislation but also to the funding, staffing, infrastructure and oversight mechanisms, including transparent reporting, parliamentary scrutiny and community engagement.

As the member for Newcastle I understand how local health infrastructure, trust in public health advice, and preparedness for outbreaks matter deeply to people's lives—in our schools, workplaces and aged-care homes and in our urban and regional centres. In recent years our nation saw how fragile continuity can be when systems are overwhelmed. As the COVID-19 response inquiry highlighted, Australia wasn't prepared for a pandemic. Because of the lack of planning, Australia's pandemic response to COVID was slow and confused and lacked authority. Our community, like so many others, lived with the uncertainty of changing rules, supply shortages, school disruptions and the heartbreak of isolation from loved ones. These were not abstract policy failures; they were lived experiences.

Communities want certainty that when the next outbreak or emerging threat arrives we will be ready. The new CDC, supported by this bill, provides that assurance. In our region, and right across Australia, this reform will streamline responses and ensure that emerging infectious threats, whether pandemic or endemic, receive a national backbone of leadership, not fragmented responses.

There are many Australians who have long advocated for this, but I want to take a moment to recognise two Novocastrians who really worked hard to ensure that this was on the Labor government's agenda and part of our national conversation. One is a fantastic local constituent of mine, Sue Wood, and the other is my predecessor, the former federal member for Newcastle, Sharon Grierson.

Let me summarise the case for supporting this bill, because I heard a lot of mischief-making last night in some of the debate on the bill. There is a strong case for supporting the bill before the House. It is foundational. Without these provisions, the CDC cannot function coherently. This bill enables clarity and certainty by legislating the roles of migration of powers to prevent legal vacuums and confusion. It respects federated responsibility; it doesn't try to usurp the states or territories. It complements, cooperates and coordinates. It safeguards rights and balances powers. Transparency, accountability, privacy protections and limitations on coercive powers are built into this legislation. It demands continued investment, so passing this bill is only the beginning. We must resource the CDC properly and ensure it remains responsive, credible and well governed.

And, above all, it is people focused. This is about protecting Australian lives, restoring trust and making sure Australians, no matter where they live, can rely on a system that is going to respond swiftly, transparently and effectively when it matters most. This bill is a solemn promise to the Australian people that we will not drift into wilful unpreparedness again and that we will build institutions that are resilient and capable of safeguarding life. In doing so, we honour the lessons from the past, from COVID and outbreaks of influenza to other health shocks. We equip our nation for the future. I commend this bill to the House, and I sincerely urge all members to support it.

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been more than five years since the world experienced a global pandemic which led Australia's dedicated health workforce to recognise alarming weaknesses in our national public health framework. At last, we are filling the gap with our own centre for disease control. I thank the Minister for Health and Ageing for stewarding the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. It's important. I look forward to the creation of an independent statutory centre in the new year. But I also foreshadow several amendments to strengthen the ACDC legislation, to expand its definition of public health matters and to ensure that pandemic preparedness and the health impacts of climate change are priority considerations of the centre from its onset. I also particularly draw the attention of the House to the fact that the minister has announced that the centre will not be funded or staffed or permitted to tackle chronic diseases and preventive health until 2028 at the very earliest and possibly never. This is a grave mistake. When the now prime minister acknowledged in 2020 that Australia was the only OECD nation without a CDC, he committed to one which would address both infectious and chronic diseases, and that commitment has to be honoured in full.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us what happens when our healthcare system and government responses to a national crisis lack coordination, transparency and preparedness. Many of us remember the fear and anxiety of 2021-22, when a government which had long claimed to have flattened the curve decided to let it rip, when we lacked PCR testing facilities, RATs, PPE and workforce protections. Those of us living in Victoria remember the anger that we felt when our prime minister did not consider it a race, when our health minister struggled to secure adequate supplies of vaccines and when our treasurer turned on his own state while it endured record lockdowns. The residua of that crisis include a life expectancy in Australia which has fallen for the first time in four decades, a depleted and exhausted healthcare workforce, ongoing shortages of medical supplies, and record low vaccination levels in our population.

At the same time, we are witnessing the dismantling of public health institutions in the United States, institutions on which we have long relied. The US CDC, the FDA, the NIH and USAID are being defunded and politicised. It's up to us to step up and to build our own world-leading public health agency. This is a responsibility, but it's also a great opportunity. Globally, centres for disease control play an essential role in the monitoring of disease and in providing sound data collection and analysis and evidence based advice to the government and non-government bodies about management of disease. Their standing as a reliable, independent source of health information and as independent advisory bodies is vital to the control of disease, both through monitoring and implementing healthcare interventions but also in ensuring that we have public trust in those interventions.

Over decades of experience, centres in North America, Africa, Europe and China have led the world in public health workforce development, global immunisation programs, responses to communicable diseases outbreaks, public health measures like seatbelt and antitobacco campaigns and concerted efforts to reduce the burden of chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and injury.

Our CDC should be all of those things. It should work collaboratively with state and territory health institutions and it should train the public healthcare workforce of the future. It should be a trusted voice giving us trustworthy public health information—a single authoritative voice at a time when we are experiencing growing misinformation and declining trust in government. The CDC must embed best practice medical research. It should engage effectively and fully with existing policy frameworks, including the National Health and Medical Research Strategy and the National Reconstruction Fund. The CDC should coordinate research into the prevention and control of communicable and non-communicable diseases from the point of view of population health systems, improving our national burden of disease, increasing life expectancy and monitoring the impact of new interventions and new healthcare innovations.

The government proposes that, for at least its first three years, the CDC should be limited to only concentrating on infectious diseases, but that artificial delineation ignores the fact that chronic and communicable diseases are an inextricably linked. Chronic diseases represent 85 per cent of Australia's disease burden, they cause or contribute to nine out of every 10 deaths in this country, and 60 per cent of Australians live with at least one chronic condition. Cancer, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease are our biggest and fastest growing healthcare challenges.

Chronic diseases also render individuals more susceptible to infections and to the health effects of climate change. They disproportionately affect Indigenous Australians, rural communities and those who are living in disadvantage. They contribute to inequity, to shorter life expectancy and to higher healthcare costs. In 2021, the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of Australians economically were six times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the most advantaged 20 per cent. That's why the CDC has to have a mandate to address chronic disease from day one.

The recently released National Climate Risk Assessment showed very starkly the risk of climate change to our health, our economy, our environment and our national security. We're already seeing the health impacts of climate change in the 445 deaths attributable to smoke exposure during the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires, the loss of more than 3,200 Australians every year from respiratory disease related to air pollution—that's way more than the number of people killed on our roads—and the increasing deaths from heatstroke and humidity. Nearly 80 per cent of us have personally experienced at least one extreme weather event since 2019. The climate risk assessment delineated the risks associated with costal inundation, loss of agricultural yield, increased spread of infectious diseases and loss of infrastructure—that is, essentially, compounding and cascading disasters.

Two of every three young Australians report that climate concerns negatively impact their mental health. Children born in 2021 will experience seven times more climate-related disasters in their lifetime than previous generations. Fossil fuels cause direct and indirect health harms from air and plastic pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss. So we have a duty to the next generation to map and plan best practice health care, all forms of health care, for this country. Our CDC should do that from day one.

The CDC should consider all preventable health conditions, and this should include the health impacts of gambling harm. Gambling addiction is a growing public health concern that affects individuals, families and communities across Australia. It's linked to mental health conditions including depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. It has physical health impacts such a stressful related illnesses, sleep disorders and substance abuse, and it causes social and economic consequences including relationship breakdowns, financial hardship, housing insecurity and, tragically, domestic violence. We should be addressing this as a public health crisis in the same way we approached tobacco in the 1970s with courage and with vision—by prioritising preventive health, by embedding harm reduction, prevention and education strategies, by providing early intervention and education services, and by legislating limits on advertising of the predatory online gambling industry. By doing that, we can limit the hurt and the harm it causes. I move the amendment circulated in my name to that end:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes the serious mental health and broader health impact of gambling addiction in Australia, and calls on the Australian Centre for Disease Control to prioritise health prevention strategies that include the prevention of gambling harm".

To be bold, to be effective, to be world leading, our CDC must be independent, and it must be well funded. Its proposed budget—$250 million over four years and $73 million annually thereafter—is manifestly inadequate. Compare that to Canada's Public Health Agency, which receives Can$675 million a year; the UK's Health Security Agency, which receives 600 million pounds annually; and the US's CDC, which receives over US$12 billion a year. With $146 billion allocated by this government to health and aged care in 2024-25, devoting less than 0.5 per cent of our healthcare budget to the CDC is a devastating failure. That budget looks even more measly when we consider the cost of the health impacts of climate change. Air pollution alone costs us $6.2 billion a year. Adding insult to injury, we have a government which confined more than $14 billion a year for fossil fuel subsidies. That's 200 times the CDC budget. So we have a government which will pay fossil fuel polluters the equivalent of $600 a year, per Australian, but will stump up only $3 a year, per Australian, for the premier public healthcare body. We are spending billions of dollars to support industries that are harmful to our health, while we are underestimating and underinvesting in the agency which is designed to protect it.

Never before has Australia more urgently needed an independent, agile and effective centre for disease control. The challenges we face, from infectious diseases to chronic disease and from antimicrobial resistance to the health impacts of climate change, demand a coordinated, expert-led response. This government's vision for the centre falls short of what we were promised during the pandemic. It falls short of what Australians need and what Australians deserve. It's not just about public health; it's about national resilience. It's about economic opportunity, and it's about ensuring that Australia can develop, manufacture and distribute critical medical interventions, vaccines, diagnostics, equipment and treatments when we need them most. We can do that with faith in our system, transparency and equity.

It would be a great tragedy for us to fail this generation and those who are to come by creating an Australian CDC without the vision and the generosity that those generations deserve. So I congratulate the government on creating an independent CDC which will provide transparent advice to government and which will be subjected to regular reviews of its activities and scope. But I ask it to build a CDC that protects all Australians not just from pandemics but from all the preventable diseases that shorten our lives and put strain on our health system. The greatest priority of our healthcare system should be to stop Australians getting sick and dying from preventable diseases. The decisions that we make now about the scope, the remit and the funding of this CDC will shape our nation's health for decades to come. This government has an extraordinary opportunity to leave a significant and lasting legacy. It has to be bold enough to take it.

Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Claire Clutterham (Sturt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. The 2019 COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most significant events to impact Australians in the last century. Some would argue it was the most significant, with lingering physical and mental health impacts still being felt across the country today. We know that most people infected with the virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. However, some will become seriously ill and require medical attention. Older people and those with underlying medical conditions—like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease or cancer—are more likely to develop serious illness. And we know that COVID-19 can be fatal.

At the beginning of the pandemic in Australia, in February 2020, there was much uncertainty as state and federal governments tried to manage what was very much a fluid situation. There is no doubt that this led to confusion, panic, anger and ultimately a mistrust in government as a patchwork of advice, restrictions and recommendations were rolled out in different ways and at different times across the country. We were not prepared for the pandemic, and this lack of planning led to a response that was slow, confusing and characterised by a multitude of different sources of information and advice—often conflicting with each other. There will be another pandemic; of this, we can be certain. The recent COVID-19 response inquiry report identified that pandemics are predicted to occur, on average, every 20 years. It warned that the likelihood of us seeing another significant event is growing—probably within the lifetime of many Australians.

Even without this forecast, it was clear that many lessons needed to be learned from the response to COVID-19 to ensure that Australia is better prepared, with a whole-of-government approach that is transparent, fair, coordinated and, most importantly, proportionate to the risks in a way that allows Australians to live their lives, to run their businesses and to attend educational institutions, workplaces and community events to the absolute fullest whilst protecting those who are vulnerable and protecting and shoring up our health system. That work has started and needs to continue so that the public trusts and has confidence that future responses to pandemics are underpinned by medical science, data and evidence—not polling, opinion, misinformation, conjecture or guesses but science. This is the principle that underpins this important bill. As the COVID-19 response inquiry report articulately put it:

The goal is to combine a balanced, proportionate and adaptable response to the threat with an approach that protects health and the health system and minimises the risk of harm to Australians and the widening of existing health, social and economic inequities.

If there is another pandemic and if the worst possible outcome is realised in that there are genuine and identifiable risks to public health and the health system such that Australians are again asked to implement restrictions in their daily lives, they won't do it unless there is public confidence in the basis for the request. They will not do it and they should not be asked to do it unless there are transparent, scientific and evidence based reasons provided to them from a single source of authority.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control will play an important role in this, in that it will strengthen public health capability, improve our preparedness for future pandemics and safeguard the health and wellbeing of all Australians. In doing this, it must operate in a way that instils public trust and confidence. The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 will establish the Australian Centre for Disease Control to begin on 1 January 2026. For the purposes of the framework in the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013, the CDC will be a non-corporate Commonwealth entity. The bill operates by amending or repealing other existing legislation, with the purpose of streamlining accountability and responsibility for public health, and for facilitating a single source of information, guidance and management of risks to public health—including the risks that may be posed by any future pandemics.

Firstly, however, the establishment of the CDC delivers on the Albanese government's election commitment in response to recommendations from the COVID-19 response inquiry report released in October 2024. Within its terms of reference, the COVID-19 response inquiry report sought to determine and lay the building blocks for what Australia can do better next time, by gathering information from people across government, the health sector, community groups and industry who were involved in Australia's COVID-19 pandemic response. The response inquiry report contained detailed recommendations, including a number for immediate action. One such recommendation was finalising the CDC and, in doing so, prioritising certain functions for systemic preparedness so that the CDC can function as a trusted and authoritative source on risk assessment and communication and a national repository of communicable disease intelligence capability and advice.

The recommended priority functions are designed to create a next-generation, world-leading public health surveillance system so that risks to public health can be promptly identified, promptly understood and then proportionately addressed. Linkages to other health authorities operated by our original partners will be a part of this, and the CDC will also build foundations for a national communicable disease data integration system, which will include working with the Department of Health and Aged Care on updated communicable disease plans. Facilitating regular reviews and stress testing Australia's overall pandemic preparedness in partnership with the National Emergency Management Agency is another priority together with establishing a national public communications function and establishing technical advisory committees to engage with subject matter experts and, importantly, to engage with community partners and stakeholders.

The CDC, though, will ultimately become the authoritative source—the single source of truth—of public health advice and information for the public, for government officials for those working in public health. With this goal in mind, the bill establishes the director-general as the head of the CDC and an advisory council to advise the director-general and will transfer some existing statutory public health functions to this director-general. These transferring functions include functions pursuant to the Biosecurity Act 2015 in that the director-general will have the ability to determine listed human diseases, a key decision which determines which human diseases are monitored at Australia's borders and where efforts are focused to prevent their spread domestically and abroad. This measure has its focus in prevention, in ensuring the CDC can identify human diseases posing a risk to Australians in a timely manner. The Biosecurity Act will continue to have application in that the CDC will be obligated to provide advice on human health risks if needed to support the analysis of the biosecurity risk of imported goods for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

The bill also amends the National Health Security Act 2007 in that the CDC will take on responsibility and be accountable for coordinating surveillance data from states and territories for diseases on the national notifiable disease list. In partnership with the Minister for Health, this will create an obligation on the CDC to ensure that the national notifiable disease list is up to date and includes relevant diseases that present genuine and identifiable risks to public health. Australia is required under Article 13 of the International Health Regulations 2005 to develop and maintain capacity to respond promptly and effectively to public health risks and public health emergencies of international concern. Pursuant to Article 4 of those regulations, the National Health Security Act establishes a national focal point to consult with responsible Commonwealth, state or territory bodies, with the World Health Organization and with other countries in relation to public health events of national significance.

With respect to the current arrangements for the National Focal Point, pursuant to section 9 of the National Health Security Act, the role is performed by the secretary of the department of health. This bill transfers this function from the secretary of the department of health to the Director-General of the CDC, which means that the CDC and the director-general will be the independent and central point of contact for significant public health events affecting Australia in and beyond our borders.

A further piece of legislation affected by the transitional provisions is the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Act of 2023, which established the registry of the same name. This registry stores data on occupational respiratory diseases in Australia, which are respiratory diseases caused by hazards in a person's work or workplace. Because a core capability and focus of the Australian CDC will be the more effective and efficient use of available public health data, including data on non-communicable diseases and issues at the interface between human health and environmental health, this bill transfers responsibility for the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry to the CDC. This will result in the CDC having direct management oversight of the registry to help reduce, and improve our understanding of, preventable occupational respiratory disease.

This bill also amends schedule 3 of the Freedom of Information Act 1982. Schedule 3 is a list of acts that contain provisions exempting documents from disclosure if the acts contain secrecy provisions. The CDC must be bound by strong safeguards designed to protect certain information, including the personal information of individual Australians, from inappropriate disclosure. The amendment to the Freedom of Information Act reinforces this protection by making clear that certain information held by the Australian CDC will not be subject to release under freedom-of-information requests or under the director-general's duty to publish public health advice and is designed to find equilibrium between the public interest, the public's right to information and the need to safeguard sensitive information. In this respect, the bill also enables the Australian CDC to collect, use and share public health information. It requires it to be transparent in this operation and to publish the recommendations that it makes to governments, so all Australians can get across the advice.

An evidence based approach to public health is required by this bill. It obliges the CDC to give evidence-based public health advice to federal and state ministers, state and territory government health agencies, international agencies and specialist non-government health organisations. A data driven, evidence based approach is the only way to ensure public confidence and trust in the operation of the CDC—to ensure public confidence and trust in the risk identification conducted by the CDC, in the data it collects, in the data it uses and in the advice it gives with respect to public health management. There is no other acceptable method to do this.

As to whether it is doing this and whether it is working as intended, the bill sets a legislated review of the operation of the act every five years to ensure that the legislation remains contemporary and supports the operation of an efficient and effective modern public health agency. This legislated review will be in addition to the initial review of funding and operations scheduled after two years.

We know we weren't prepared last time. The establishment of the Australian CDC is critical to ensuring that we are prepared next time and can better protect the health and wellbeing of Australians in a fair way that is proportionate to the risks.

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. The establishment of an Australian CDC was a key recommendation out of the Commonwealth government COVID-19 response inquiry report. It's not a new idea. Medical experts and peak bodies in Australia have been calling for a CDC for years. All other OECD nations have a CDC or equivalent health authority, and I am glad to see this legislation being introduced and debated.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill seeks to do three things: (1) establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control, known as the CDC; (2) create a Director-General of the CDC and an advisory council to advise the federal and state governments, health peak bodies and the Australian public on public health matters; and (3) introduce a new framework for the transparency of public health advice and data sharing for public health use. The consequential amendments and transitional provisions bill provides for some powers that already exist within relevant government agencies to transfer to the Director-General of the CDC.

I welcome this legislation and the establishment of an Australian CDC. Timely, accurate, coordinated public health advice is good for our country. Before being elected as the member for Indi, I worked clinically as a nurse and a midwife and I had a masters in public health and worked as a regional health researcher. I've dedicated more than half of my life to health care, and I truly care about this bill. As a former health researcher, I'm pleased to see the CDC legislation supporting the improvement of a nationally coordinated approach to health data. National collaboration and sharing of high-quality data across states and territories improve the accuracy of our understanding of the issues impacting our health. It helps us to identify population-level trends and predict and respond to public health issues.

There are positive transparency measures included in this bill. I support the requirements for the Director-General of the CDC to publish advice and recommendations given to the government within 30 days of that advice being provided. This is good. This comes with some important exceptions where that advice may identify particular people or groups of people, to protect their privacy, and this is good.

This is why I support the government's intention to establish a CDC. As a trusted source of public health expertise and advice, the CDC will be responsible for overseeing coordinated responses to communicable and non-communicable diseases. This is a valuable—a critical—resource for our country. The importance of a coordinated response to infectious diseases was made abundantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities in my electorate—border communities in particular—suffered from states differentiating their responses. Albury-Wodonga, a community divided by the Murray River, acts as one community. People living on the border regularly cross it for school, for work, to attend medical appointments or to do their groceries. Indeed, we share a hospital across the border. Yet, when COVID hit and the New South Wales and Victorian borders closed, the Albury-Wodonga community was literally split in two. Differing public health responses from two state governments, including closing borders at different times, caused significant strain on my border community, a community I love and represent. A centralised response to infectious diseases and pandemics, coordinated by the CDC, will be a positive improvement for our healthcare landscape.

The minister has said that, in its initial years, the CDC's priorities will focus on communicable diseases and pandemic preparedness. I understand that, after two years, the minister hopes for an independent review of the CDC's funding and operation. Following this review, the intention is to progressively expand its areas of remit into areas such as chronic conditions and the health impacts of climate change. However, I'm concerned that this two-year review is not legislated, nor is the direction for the CDC to expand into all areas of public health, as defined within the legislation.

I recognise that the intention of the phased expansion of the CDCs operations is to enable the CDC to initially focus on pandemic preparedness. Let me be clear: I want the CDC to have every success at its establishment. However, I am deeply troubled by the delay in the CDC's direction to understand and respond to preventive health, to chronic disease and to environmental health. This is critical. Regional Australia has unique health needs. There is greater prevalence of many diseases and illnesses in rural Australia. Indeed, as you travel further from major cities, the burden of non-communicable disease increases for conditions like coronary heart disease, COPD, lung cancer, stroke and type 2 diabetes. In rural Australia we have poorer access to health services in our communities and lower-than-average incomes to pay for expensive healthcare treatments. And, tragically, on average rural Australians die younger than our city counterparts.

Preventive health is within the scope of the CDC. It is critical to the CDC. And it's a mistake to be delaying the CDC's oversight over preventive health measures. It's a mistake that will disproportionately impact negatively upon rural communities. It's a mistake that we can't afford to make. We mustn't delay on this. The government needs to get cracking on preventive health. It's an absolute priority for when the CDC is set up.

There are parts of this legislation, particularly around the CDC governance and review process, that also concern me. We've seen in the United States only recently the consequences of politicising health care and the appointment of the director-general of their CDC. At a time when, in the United States, the CDC is being gutted and their president is issuing absurd and dangerous misinformation—talking about the use of paracetamol while pregnant—we need to guard against any such things ever happening in our country. We should not be taking health advice from the man who suggested that bleach is a legitimate treatment for COVID. This is a big warning sign. Paracetamol is an important and effective drug for reducing fever. A gold-standard Swedish study of more than two million children found that acetaminophen use in pregnancy is not associated with children's risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability. What the United States president is saying is truly absurd.

Why do I talk about this? I talk about this because it perfectly exemplifies why it is essential that our health information comes from trusted sources that understand science and research, that apply science and research, and that can communicate this information accurately and accessibly. It further worries me that former US CDC director-general Susan Monarez has testified in front of a Senate health committee alleging that she was fired after just 29 days in the job for refusing to pre-approve recommendations on vaccines without being given the opportunity to assess the scientific evidence.

We are seeing increasing misinformation, anti-science rhetoric and the politicisation of health internationally. So it is more important now than ever that we establish a robust CDC with an independent director-general to provide evidence based health advice. This bill has only one requirement for the appointment of the director-general of the CDC, and that is that the minister is satisfied that the person has appropriate expertise, qualifications or experience. Frankly, this is not good enough. We need to legislate not just for today but for the future. We need to bomb-proof this appointment to the CDC to absolutely be certain of independence.

So, I'll be supporting amendments to strengthen the independence of the appointment of the director-general. It's essential that our CDC legislation protects against vested political interests, appointing individuals to the director-general position who have political biases. The bill before us is an opportunity to get this right—and we must get it right.

I remain unconvinced about the integrity and independence of the statutory review process in the legislation as it currently stands. The legislation requires a review of the CDC every five years. However, the requirements for this review really must be strengthened. Any review of the operations and funding of the CDC must be independent, conducted by experts with relevant expertise, to understand the critical nature of the CDC. To that end, I'll be moving amendments to establish best practice for the integrity of the review process. My amendments seek to ensure the independence of the review of the CDC.

My amendments would require that three individuals be appointed by the minister to the review panel undertaking the statutory review. These individuals must have relevant related experience to properly understand the function of the CDC. To ensure the review's impartiality, they must not be on the CDC advisory council and they must not be current employees of the Commonwealth Public Service or current or former members of the Commonwealth parliament. My amendments would also improve the timeliness and transparency of the review process, requiring the government's response to the review be tabled in the parliament for all to see. These amendments will ensure a robust review process, and I urge the government to back them. I value engagement with the minister on these good-faith amendments.

It's important that Australia has an independent CDC that provides independent, trustworthy advice to the government, key health bodies and the Australian people about our most precious of resources: our health. We must have confidence in the CDC's independence and the review process to ensure this happens. We need to bake this in right now. The establishment of an Australian CDC is an important step forward in our public health architecture, and I truly welcome the establishment of the CDC, but I do so knowing that good-faith amendments are here on the table for the minister to improve the integrity of the statutory review process, because they are very much needed. A robust and transparent CDC will support public health prevention and response well into the future. It's critical that we get this right from the very beginning.

Gabriel Ng (Menzies, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. This is a significant measure in strengthening our nation's public health system. The bill establishes the Australian Centre for Disease Control, a dedicated and independent Commonwealth entity. It fulfils a key election commitment of the Albanese Labor government and responds to the pressing need to prepare our country for future health emergencies. Experts, consumer groups and the independent COVID-19 response inquiry have long called for this reform, and today we can say we have listened and we are delivering.

This legislation gives Australians confidence that future health emergencies will be managed by a modern, nationally coordinated body that can provide authoritative and evidence based public health advice. The centre will be independent and protected from politicisation. Its leadership will rest with the director-general, supported by an advisory council comprising experts who will guide priorities and offer sound recommendations. The centre will not operate in isolation. It will work in close partnership with the states, territories and the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. This collaboration ensures no state or territory is left behind and that all Australians benefit from consistent, science driven public health strategies.

Importantly, this bill will streamline the way public health data is collected, linked and shared across jurisdictions. Strong and coordinated data systems mean that emerging trends can be identified faster and responded to more effectively.

Transparency will also be a cornerstone of the centre's work. It will publish the recommendations it provides to governments, allowing the public to see the evidence behind decisions and building trust in the advice given. This legislation is about protecting Australians and strengthening our resilience for whatever health challenges lie ahead.

COVID-19 was a difficult time for a lot of Australians. Sometimes there is a reluctance to talk about it. However, as a progressive government, we always accept the responsibility of planning for the future. We do not bury our heads in the sand. We ensure that we are always striving to make sure that the government can better support the Australian public. This means examining this challenging period with clear eyes and identifying where mistakes were made and where we can do better. We must acknowledge that delayed action in areas like acquiring sufficient vaccine stock and inconsistent responses between states cost lives and erode public confidence in the government.

Establishing a centre for disease control is about addressing those shortcomings by creating a permanent institution that can detect risks, coordinate responses and better prepare us for future threats. It is about establishing and delivering on our responsibility to protect Australians' health, both now and for generations to come. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed deep-rooted weaknesses in our ability to respond to public national health emergencies. The failures in leadership by the Morrison government left the burden to fall on the states. Responses were fragmented, data often failed to move between jurisdictions, and the absence of a single authoritative national body meant that at times communities were uncertain about the facts. The rampant spread of misinformation, combined with a lack of a national source of truth, left Australians vulnerable and confused. It was only when the government announced an independent COVID-19 response inquiry that these systematic failures were laid bare. That inquiry's central recommendation was the establishment of this centre. We are here today to act on those findings.

A modern public health agency must be able to identify threats early, share data seamlessly across borders and coordinate responses with speed and efficiency. For too long, our system has relied on ad hoc arrangements, outdated legislation and decisions made by individual jurisdictions. Not only does this increase the risk of worse health outcomes, but it's also inefficient, requiring each state and territory to come up with their own responses, to duplicate resources and to come up with their own policy solutions. This centre is designed to close those gaps. It will unite expertise in epidemiology, infectious diseases, data science and public communication under one roof—one trusted message for all Australians.

Of course, we hope there will never be another pandemic, but, while we can hope for the best, we also have a responsibility to prepare for the worst. We cannot afford to wait for the next outbreak to build the infrastructure and expertise we need. We cannot simply assume that, because we endured COVID-19, we are safe from future threats. This is about protecting Australians from the health risks that lie ahead, from emerging infectious diseases to climate driven health challenges that are growing in frequency and complexity. By investing in a CDC now, we are equipping our country with the tools to mitigate risks before they escalate into national emergencies. As a government, we understand that public health is not just about individual wellbeing. It is also a matter of national security and economic stability. Without a healthy population, we do not have a productive workforce. Without that workforce, our economy suffers. Australians deserve a health system that is fit for the challenges of the 21st century.

It is worth reflecting on what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments across Australia acted quickly to stop the spread of the disease. Restrictive measures were enacted: enforcing the closure of businesses and schools, mandating social distancing and limiting movement, to name a few. The necessary swiftness of these measures saved lives and protected the health system, but the economic, social and mental health impacts were not always fully understood. I say again that we cannot forget the failures of the Morrison Liberal government in being too slow to acquire vaccines and distribute them. Vaccines were our main path out of the measures that we had to put in place to protect public health, and a slowness and delay in acquiring them meant that lockdowns had to be longer than needed.

We can also look further back to understand how we reached this point. The truth is that Australia once had a dedicated public health agency, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, established by a Labor government in 2010. In 2014, that agency was abolished by the coalition government. At the time, the decision was justified under the guise of reducing the size of government and achieving greater efficiency, but what efficiency was achieved? Instead of strengthening the health system, this decision dismantled our national preventive health infrastructure and left us without a central body to coordinate and advise on emerging threats. That gap in leadership came at a profound cost to Australians. So, when the pandemic struck in 2020, we paid the price for this lack of foresight. Instead of having a ready, independent source of expertise to guide national decision-making, each state and territory was left to handle the crisis largely on its own.

Here we see the dangers of the Liberal ideological opposition to a strong Public Service. In the last election campaign, we saw the Liberal opposition put forward an arbitrary number to cut the Public Service by, without regard for the measures that were needed and the way that public services needed to have sufficient resources to perform its functions, for example, protecting public health. The absence of a national coordinating body left us vulnerable to inconsistent approaches and delayed action. There was no failure of our public health professionals in the COVID-19 pandemic. They served the nation with courage and skill. It was a failure of planning and investment by the coalition government.

Health care is at the heart of Labor's mission. We understand that protecting public health is essential. When the coalition cuts, Australians pay. The Albanese government is determined to ensure that never happens again. This bill demonstrates our commitment to rebuilding and strengthening Australia's public health capacity after nine years of coalition cuts and neglect. The Australian Centre for Disease Control will not only safeguard the public from future health emergencies but also uphold transparency and accountability. In an era of misinformation and political opportunism, the CDC will be required to publish the recommendations it provides to government. This will help the public see the evidence behind decisions and build trust in the advice given. That stands in stark contrast to the confusion and secrecy that too often characterised the coalition government's approach. The CDC will be a statutory authority with clearly defined responsibilities and a mandate to advise not only the federal government but also the states, territories and even international partners such as the World Health Organization.

This is a genuine reform, driven by evidence and shaped by the hard lessons of recent history. Before we came to government, Australia was the only OECD nation without a dedicated CDC. That absence left a gap in our ability to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies. That is why we are prioritising this bill. Establishing the CDC will deliver practical and measurable benefits for the public, for governments and for the health system. It will ensure that our country's capacity to protect Australians is on par with, and in some areas better than, comparable nations in the OECD. The benefits go beyond infectious diseases. While the CDC's initial focus will be on communicable diseases, its remit will expand over time to include chronic and occupational illnesses, climate related health risks and other emerging challenges. Establishing the CDC is not just a response to the challenges of the past; it is investment in a safer, healthier and more resilient future.

This bill lays the foundation for a national agency that will protect Australians from the health threats of tomorrow. That is what Labor governments do. We strengthen the health system and invest in the long-term wellbeing of our communities. The last time Australia had a national preventive health agency was under a Labor government. Once again, it is Labor taking the responsibility to ensure that Australians have the health protection they deserve. That is the vision of the Albanese Labor government: an Australia where health decisions are guided by science, where transparency builds trust and where the systems are strong enough to protect every community—an Australia where the public can rely on and trust the information they receive, safeguarded from misinformation and political opportunism. This legislation brings us closer to that vision. That is why I commend this bill to the House.

Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025 and commend the government for establishing an Australian CDC to permanently monitor and assess public health risks, proactively work to prevent them and prepare Australia for future health crises. The establishment of an Australian centre for disease control is long overdue and a welcome initiative. It represents a critical step forward in strengthening our national public health infrastructure and ensuring we are better prepared for future health emergencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed serious gaps in our readiness, coordination and data sharing, and this bill seeks to address many of those shortcomings. The idea of a national CDC has been discussed for multiple decades, with repeated calls for it to be established from public health experts and professional bodies dating back to the 1980s. It was promised during the 2022 federal election and has been the subject of extensive consultation since.

While I strongly support the intent of this bill, I do have a number of concerns about specific provisions and believe the bill could be improved. These concerns relate to: the exclusion of prevention of non-communicable diseases or chronic conditions from the foundational scope of the CDC; the lack of an independent selection progress for the employment of the director-general and the members of the advisory council; the lack of an explicit climate change ambit; and the limited functions of the director-general, which currently do not include the promotion of research or ensuring workforce capability. I have raised these concerns in detail with the Minister for Health and Ageing with the aim of ensuring that the final legislation delivers the robust, independent and effective public health agency that Australians deserve, and I thank the minister and his staff for their time and consideration.

I want to speak firstly to the foundational scope of the CDC, which does not reflect Australia's burden of disease. Currently, the scope of the CDC excludes prevention of non-communicable diseases or chronic conditions altogether. While the draft legislation specifies that the inclusion of chronic conditions in the CDC's remit will be considered by a review of operations and funding in 2028, the reality is that our population and our health system cannot wait. Excluding the prevention of chronic disease from the foundational scope of the CDC is a missed opportunity for the future of public health. Chronic conditions are driving right now the greatest morbidity, inequity and health costs in our country. As asserted by the University of Sydney School of Public Health, the Australian CDC will underperform if it is purely limited to infection diseases outbreaks from the outset and must include chronic disease prevention. Both the George Institute for Global Health and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners support the establishment of an Australian CDC that incorporates both communicable and non-communicable disease prevention.

This year's General practice: health of the nation 2025 report shows that, in 2022, an estimated 15.4 million Australians were living with a long-term or chronic health condition. The report, based on the results from the health of the nation survey of nearly 3,000 GPs, found that the prevalence of chronic diseases, including diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular conditions, is a major concern for GPs across the country. These conditions are often presenting earlier and with greater complexity and multimorbidity, requiring sustained and coordinated management.

The alarming fact is that more than one-third of Australia's burden of disease in 2024 could have been prevented by reducing exposure to modifiable risk factors. GPs are uniquely placed to provide comprehensive preventive care, and the health of the nation report shows that four in five GPs want to provide more of this type of care, but they need increased MBS rebates and incentive schemes to be able to do so. Waiting another two years to consider including prevention of non-communicable diseases in the remit of the Australian CDC is not good enough. We must listen to the healthcare professionals who are seeing the costly and debilitating impact of chronic disease on Australians and include the prevention of chronic conditions in the mission of the Australian CDC from the start.

Next, I am deeply concerned by the lack of an independent appointment process for both the director-general and the advisory council members. Both the director-general and the advisory council members represent significant public appointments, and they should be subject to a transparent and quality appointments process. Ideally, this would be undertaken within a comprehensive Commonwealth framework for transparent and quality appointments, such as was put forward in my own Transparent and Quality Public Appointments Bill that I introduced in this place in 2023. However, in the absence of this framework, the bill itself should be amended to ensure that the appointment of the director-general and members of the advisory council is independent from government. This is essential not only to safeguard the integrity of the CDC's scientific advice but also to avoid any perception of political interference, undue influence or jobs for mates. Public trust in the CDC will depend on its ability to operate transparently and free from partisan interests, and that begins with how its leadership is selected.

As we prepare for the creation of our own Australian Centre for Disease Control, many have looked on with deep concern at recent developments in the US, where Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr's former deputy has been selected as the interim director of the US CDC. As a doctor, I understand intimately the importance of ensuring that public health advice is grounded in science, not personal opinion or political ideology. That is precisely why double-blind randomised controlled trials are considered the gold standard of medical evidence. They are designed to minimise human bias and uphold scientific integrity. In the case of the US CDC, we are now witnessing one of the world's most respected scientific institutions being influenced by a figure with a well-known history of vaccine scepticism. This shift has been made possible in large part because the health secretary holds the power to hire and fire the CDC leadership. Dr Susan Monarez was dismissed as director of the US CDC by Secretary Kennedy after just one month in that role. In testimony before the US Senate, she stated that her dismissal followed her refusal to terminate senior scientists or to preapprove changes to vaccine guidance without access to the relevant scientific data. The White House later confirmed that she was removed because she was 'not aligned with the President's agenda'. This example underscores the critical importance of ensuring that our own CDC is built on a foundation of independence, scientific rigour and transparency.

I will be moving amendments to the bill to ensure that the appointment of both the director-general and members of the advisory council includes the establishment of an appropriately qualified selection panel for purposes of assessing whether a candidate is suitable for the appointment; a requirement for the panel to advertise the appointment, conduct interviews and shortlist at least three candidates for appointment; a requirement for the panel to consider the criteria set out in clause 10 as well as quality, experience, integrity and opportunities for promoting diversity in the public sector; a requirement for the panel to provide a comparative assessment of the candidates and a certification statement indicating that they are eligible for the appointment; and, finally, a requirement that the minister may only appoint from those shortlisted candidates. I also support the member for Indi's related amendment that would ensure an independent and transparent review of the operation of the act, and I will be moving an amendment to ensure that the chair of the advisory council is selected from the council rather than being the director-general, which, as currently drafted, unnecessarily risks undermining the independence and accountability of the council's advice.

Next I want to turn to the relationship between the CDC and climate change and how this connection could be strengthened to ensure our public health response is aligned with the realities of a warming world. Climate change is one of the greatest threats—is the greatest threat—to global public health. It is already driving increases in heat related illnesses, the spread of infectious diseases, food and water insecurity, and the displacement of vulnerable populations. A national CDC must be equipped to respond to these complex and evolving challenges with evidence based strategies and long-term planning.

While the current interim CDC includes a climate and health expert group charged with implementing a national health and climate strategy, it is not clear whether it will be funded and staffed to undertake this role before the agency's initial review in 2028. Additionally, one of the key functions of the director-general is the provision of public health advice to Commonwealth ministers, Commonwealth entities, state and territory entities, international organisations and a range of other public health bodies. While this advice must relate to public health matters, which is defined broadly at clause 5 of the bill to include 'preventative health, environmental health and the health effects of climate change', it is currently not an explicit function of the director-general to consult with and provided advice to bodies whose objects include mitigation of an adaptation to climate change. The member for Kooyong is moving an amendment to that effect, and I wholeheartedly support the amendment. I also strongly support the member for Kooyong's amendment that would require the minister to prepare a biennial statement on the health effects of climate change to be tabled in each house of the parliament. Health and climate are inextricably linked, and we must recognise and respond to the growing health impacts of a warming world.

Finally, the Australian Centre for Disease Control must be properly funded to fulfil its mandate. Preventive health care is consistently underfunded and often overshadowed by more immediate and politically visible health pressures, but the establishment of the CDC presents a rare opportunity to shift that pattern. The government's current commitment of $250 million over four years, with further funding for ongoing annual operations, falls well short of what is needed. For comparison, the Rudd government allocated $218 million to chronic disease prevention programs in a single year. With a total health and aged care budget of $146 billion in 2024-25, the CDC's proposed funding is entirely inadequate. If we are serious about building a strong, independent and effective public health institution, we must back it with the resources it needs to succeed.

In conclusion, I commend the government for taking this important step in establishing the Australian Centre for Disease Control, and I acknowledge and thank the minister for his leadership in bringing this long-awaited reform forward. With some targeted improvements, such as embedding prevention and chronic disease within the CDC's foundational scope, ensuring an independent appointment process for its director-general and advisory council, strengthening it remit on climate and health, and providing it with adequate and sustained funding, the CDC could be truly a world-class institution that protects and promotes the health of all Australians.

I move the amendment circulated in my name:

That all words after "House" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"(1) notes that:

(a) chronic conditions:

(i) are the biggest killer in Australia, contributing to nearly 9 out of 10 deaths;

(ii) result in 6.4 million preventable hospitalisations per year costing approximately $82 billion in health expenditure; and

(iii) are estimated to cost $67.7 billion in lost labour force participation by 2030; and

(b) preventing and reducing this burden of disease would provide an estimated $8 billion in extra earnings, and $6.3 billion in welfare support and hospital admission savings annually; and

(2) calls on the Government to include prevention of chronic conditions as part of the Australian Centre for Disease Control's mission from the outset".

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. This could start a little bit from left field because I am not a doctor. Sporting coaches are strange. They say stuff like, 'Preparing to fail is failing to prepare,' and reverse it. I had one coach who really liked General Patton, so all around our locker room was his favourite quote, which was: 'I would rather sweat than bleed. You are better off sweating in peacetime so that you don't bleed in war.' It seemed a bit dramatic for under-19s basketball, but here we are.

But they were right. What they were getting at is that, in sport, you see two hours on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon at the pub, a mate's place or with the family, but you don't see the hours and hours of preparation—the 15 to 30 hours that the players have spent on the training track or the hundreds of hours that have been done in the film room by scouts, coaches and videographers to make sure that the players are prepared.

You want to have the scout; the scout needs to be in. You want to know what you're doing. You want to know what they want to do. You don't want to be surprised—if I do this, they will do that; if I'm over here, they will go over there. And, most importantly, you need to know how to stop them.

This lesson translates as well in life, and, unfortunately, COVID-19 was a perfect example of this. It hit Australia and it hit the world hard. We were not prepared.

I was a sport and rec officer—deemed frontline. I had to try to navigate my way through chief health operation officers, deemings, the requirements. What does that look like for a sport? What sport can we still play? How do I contact trace? How do we sign people in? How do we sign people out? If tennis is okay, is squash okay? Is golf okay? Rugby League was probably out, but I didn't know. I wasn't prepared.

When the lockdowns happened and my children suddenly became homeschooled, I thought that I could just hand over the work sheet that I'd printed out for them from the school. It doesn't work that way with a grade 3 kid and a grade 5 kid. I couldn't do my work and teach them at the same time. It turns out I'm not a teacher either. I was not prepared. We were not prepared.

When the borders shut, the migrant workers stopped coming and tourism dried up almost immediately, the Cairns economy tanked. We had become so reliant on overseas work, a service based economy and a tourism based economy. We were not prepared. We didn't understand the scout. We didn't know what we were up against.

Chief health officers become recognised figures—probably something chief health officers don't want to do. They want to inform policy, help people stay safe and make sure the health system is working. They don't want to be on TV, generally speaking.

Federal, state and territory leaders had to get up every day and inform us on disease numbers and deaths. We had regular meetings right across the country, but everything was reactive. We had no preparation. We had no understanding of what this would look like. I remember sitting at home and getting ready to watch the Wildcats versus Sydney in the grand final—and Sydney forfeited. I couldn't believe it. In 20 years, I never got close to a grand final, but these guys, unsure of what the future was going to look like, made the decision to pull the plug. It was then I understood that it was serious—but always reactive.

In Australia we were spared the worst of it, a happy circumstance of the tyranny of distance and weather. We weren't inside, like some of my friends in New York, with ducted heating and ducted air conditioning, which spread the virus quickly. Friends of mine from the city would tell me that ice trucks were being used as makeshift morgues because everything was full. We were spared that, and we're lucky.

Our dedicated health workers drove themselves into the ground, the psychological scars of which are still current for them. They worked day and night to keep us all safe, and they did a fantastic job. But, I think, in hindsight we can all agree that we probably could have done a bit better in that response.

One of the glaring holes was, of course, that we hadn't trained. In the previous 12 years, we had not had one pandemic drill for what might happen to Australia, and this lack of planning meant that our response was slow and confused. In fact, when the Albanese Labor government was first elected, Australia was the only OECD country without a CDC or its equivalent. You've got to be prepared. The scouts are prepared; we weren't prepared.

The COVID-19 inquiry called for an Australian CDC, and that is what the Anthony Albanese Labor government is delivering. You'll be very glad to know that this will deliver on our commitment to deliver a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control. Science will drive the CDC.

The bill will establish this as a non-corporate Commonwealth entity, and, better yet, it starts very soon—1 January 2026. The body takes over from the interim CDC, which was established in 2023, to immediately improve the way we respond to health and emergencies. The Albanese Labor government has already run pandemic drills this term through Exercise Volare. This is about strengthening our biosecurity, making sure that we've got measures against things like avian flu, which has decimated chicken populations in the Northern Hemisphere and is actually killing seals in San Francisco—proving that it will mutate and move from species to species.

Under this bill the CDC will strengthen our public health capacity to improve our preparedness for future pandemics and safeguard health and wellbeing for all Australians and our wildlife. The CDC will have a broad range of functions on a range of public health matters, including preventing communicable diseases, providing independent advice on public health risks, strengthening data and analytics capabilities and building its role as a trusted adviser to governments on public health and safety risks. The analytics and the data are important. Knowledge is power. Understanding the spread of like viruses, knowing how they're going to react and understanding how to put stops in place to ensure that they don't get to our most vulnerable communities—I represent some of the most vulnerable communities in Australia.

When COVID hit, the cape looked down. You couldn't go north of Mossman; Yarrabah shut the road. So fearful were those communities of COVID-19 getting in there and wiping out the elders, that they cut themselves off completely from the outside world. We need to give our people assurances that that is not necessary. They need to know that we can protect them, and the CDC is a massive part of that. It'll provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory health organisations, international agencies, specialists and non-government health organisations. It is anticipated that this will be the authoritative source for public health advice. This will be where you go; this will be the source of truth for all public health officials and those working in the public health space.

Independence and integrity are essential to making sure that this works—which is why the CDC, through this bill, will ensure it remains completely independent and cannot be subjected to any kind of direction from ministers or government departments. Science will run this—not feelings, not thoughts and not ideologies but science. When COVID-19 hit us and the world got together and made a decision, a vaccine was created in under six months. That is a testament to the power of science and human ingenuity, and it shows us what we can do on a global scale when we put our minds to it. Science saves lives.

A single source of truth will be able to produce real data that can be trusted. Knowledge, as I said before, is power. And I think it's important to remind people that, while this bill and the creation of the CDC may seem like a reaction to COVID-19, it's not about COVID-19. We met that head on and came out okay—not great, but okay. This is about what comes next, because a part of the scout is looking back at what you've done, figuring out what went wrong and making sure that the plans are in place to not make those mistakes again—understanding the weaknesses, understanding the holes in your game and putting in the safeguards. Otherwise you're destined and doomed to create the same problems. This isn't about if; this is about when.

Our planet has a history of pandemics: Black Death, Spanish flu, Ebola, AIDS—all of which have devastating effects on communities. It is only a matter of time until we see another pandemic reach that kind of status—be it avian flu or another coronavirus, it's going to happen. So the sooner we start preparing and the sooner we start training, the better off we will be. But, beyond the global scale, the CDC will have real benefits for the people that I represent. In recent weeks there have been a number of measles outbreaks in Cairns. The contact tracing was second to none. They went through 2½ thousand people, they were able to isolate potential carriers and they kept my community safe.

The Cape has a range of diseases and STIs, some of them eradicated in what you consider mainstream Australia. I can guarantee you workers on the front line will take any kind of extra help and data they can get, because they are working themselves to the bone. A quick Google search of the infectious diseases currently running around Cape York include melioidosis, dengue, Ross River fever, tuberculosis, nontuberculous microbacteria infection and other diseases such as whooping cough, meningococcal and bloodborne viruses such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV and, recently, malaria, which was found in Lakeland. These are things which create an existential threat to the people of my electorate, and a centre for disease control can only help them.

Some of these diseases will only become more common with the impacts of climate change, and Australia isn't alone in dealing with the potential of pandemic. Papua New Guinea is our northernmost neighbour, which, as the Prime Minister said the other day you could swim across to from Saibai. You wouldn't, because there are things in there that will eat you. But you could! Tuberculosis runs rampant through PNG. Our nearest neighbour is suffering under the burden of a disease that was eradicated in the Western world in the 1940s. We have an obligation to protect our nearest neighbours, with whom we have an alliance, and to ensure that tuberculosis does not take a foothold in the most vulnerable parts of my electorate and our community.

A better coordinated approach will ensure that the people on the ground have what they need to protect our nation. The CDC is a national security issue. So, whether it's the health centres in Aurukun, Kowanyama or Lockhart River, whether it's our remote hospitals on Thursday Island, Weipa or Cooktown or whether it's our health centres in the Torres Strait, which deal with the treaty villages in PNG as they come across the strait there to get help at Saibai or Boigu, they all deserve our best foot forward in fighting these infectious diseases and for us to give our health professionals more tools. This will be a policy guided by experts—always. There is no place for any politician with no background in health to have a say and try to tell doctors and nurses what to do in this situation. They spend years studying this. They're experts; they're good at it. They swear an oath to protect us, and they will do so with these new abilities.

Whether it's vaccines, masks or any kind of pandemic response, we should listen to those who know what they're talking about. By having a strong and independent CDC, we can make sure that our professionals and experts on the front line fighting these pandemics have the authority, the data and the information to keep us safe. This is another example of Labor building a strong health system and assuring a bright future for my electorate. I commend the bill to the House.

Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Greens have long been calling for the establishment of a well funded CDC, and we will be supporting this legislation in the House. However, there are some improvements that we believe could be made. We'd like to see the CDC have an increased scope and funding so that it can be well prepared to support our Australian community for chronic diseases.

The ongoing inquiry into this bill has clearly highlighted that the exclusion of chronic diseases is an omission, and its inclusion would provide great benefits to our community. We acknowledge that the minister in his second reading speech flagged the possibility of expanding the CDC's scope to include chronic disease after a later review, but we don't believe that that's good enough. The CDC should include non-communicable and chronic diseases in its remit from the beginning.

Further, the inquiry into this bill has uncovered a range of good ideas that, if implemented, would ensure that the community can have a high degree of trust in the CDC, including, as previous speakers have mentioned, strengthening transparency, governance and independence. The Greens will be seeking to support amendments that ensure our community can have trust in the CDC.

Additionally, the Greens are very pleased to see that there is a focus within the CDC legislation on First Nations health care and addressing the inequalities that exist. We're pleased that at least one member of the advisory council will be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander so that lived experience is included in the advice to the director-general. It's absolutely vital that the Centre for Disease Control and the advice that it provides reflect the diversity and lived experience of our community, and it's concerning that the legislation does not mention disability once. The Greens believe that disability health is an important subsection of public health and should be recognised as a public health matter in the bill.

One of the reasons this CDC is so needed is the constant undermining and privatisation of our so-called universal public health system. We see it with the private health insurance industry, propped up by government subsidies as competitors to the government's own system. Government subsidies are actually supporting these competitors to the government's own public health system. We also see the effects of that with privatisation of our public assets like CSL, which now posts huge profits for its shareholders every year. They sold Australia off for a song. Labor sold off CSL in the nineties for $300 million. The company is now worth $100 billion, and last year it made $5 billion in profit—with no tax paid, by the way. Those who were in the know enough at the time to pick up some shares when they were initially sold in 1994 have profited absolutely enormously. They've made their money back 500 times over. For comparison, the same figure for the Commonwealth Bank, also privatised by the Keating Labor government, is 50. Imagine what we could have had if CSL were still in public hands—a publicly owned pharmaceutical manufacturer working in the interests of everyday Australians, not its shareholders. This privatisation might be the absolute worst deal in Australian history. I don't want to undermine the importance of the services that CSL provides. We know they're so critical, and we saw that during the pandemic. But the profit motive will always fundamentally conflict with the need to provide the best possible health care to all Australians. We absolutely must keep essential services in public hands.

Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make my contribution on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. Before Labor came to government, Australia was the only country in the OECD without a centre for disease control or its equivalent. Australia was not prepared for the pandemic, and our response to COVID was slow and confused and lacked authority. This was highlighted in the Commonwealth government COVID-19 response inquiry report, released in October last year. The inquiry called for an Australian CDC, and that is what the Albanese government is delivering.

The Australian CDC will strengthen public health capability, improve our preparedness for future pandemics and safeguard the health and wellbeing of all Australians. It will provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory health agencies, international agencies and specialist non-government health organisations. It will be an authoritative source of public health advice and information for government officials working in public health, as well as for the public themselves. Importantly, it will support the better use of data through enabling the Australian CDC to collect, use and share public health information, requiring it to be transparent in its operations and requiring it to publish the recommendations it provides to governments.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill will establish the Australian CDC, to commence operations on 1 January 2026 as an independent Commonwealth statutory agency. It establishes the director-general as the head of the Australian CDC and establishes an advisory council to advise the director-general. The accompanying consequential amendments and transitional provisions bill will transfer some of the existing statutory public health functions to the new director-general. In particular, the director-general will perform some functions under the Biosecurity Act 2015, the National Health Security Act 2007 and the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Act 2023.

The accompanying bill will repeal the Australian National Preventive Health Agency Act 2010. This agency was abolished by the coalition government in 2014, but the act has not been repealed. The C&T bill also amends the Freedom of Information Act 1982 to exempt a document or information contained in a document for release under a FOI request if the document or information is protected information under this bill.

The Australian CDC will be Australia's primary national agency for public health expertise and advice. It will help set the direction on areas of national public health priorities. It will also support the existing work of the Australian government and states and territories to plan and prepare for future health threats and emergencies. The Australian CDC will be an agency within the health portfolio and work along the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. The department will continue to be responsible for health emergency response coordination and major program delivery, such as health support in national disasters, the National Medical Stockpile and the National Immunisation Program. The Australian CDC will be empowered to provide advice on the best ways to manage all forms of diseases, but this will be staged, primarily starting with communicable diseases.

The CDC's remit is expected to grow over time and will be informed by a review of the CDC's funding and operations in 2028. The independent COVID-19 response inquiry recommended a review of the CDC on its initial progress to inform any stage expansion. To ensure that the legislation remains contemporary and supports the operation of a modern public health agency, the CDC bill sets a legislative review of operation every five years. The legislative review will be in addition to the initial review of funding and operation scheduled after two years. Establishing an Australian CDC is widely supported by many consumer and health peak bodies, infectious disease specialists and the research community. It addresses some capability gaps identified in the COVID-19 response inquiry.

The bills also provide an opportunity for the Australian CDC to deliver a modern approach to national public health data, enabling faster, more accurate detection of risks and delivering more consistent responses across borders and a stronger foundation for pandemic planning and management. The bill streamlines data sharing for public health and linkages across the Commonwealth, state and territory governments. It includes strong safeguards to ensure that data sharing serves the public interest without compromising the privacy of individuals.

The establishment of the CDC is a critical opportunity to assist in addressing the disproportionate gendered effects of communicable disease on some of our most vulnerable Australians. It will ensure we are prepared and can better protect the health and wellbeing of our fellow citizens. Establishing the Australian CDC as an independent Commonwealth statutory agency also ensures it remains independent and cannot be subjected to direction from ministers or government departments. The functions of the Australian CDC are expected to expand into the future and will respond to emerging public health risks.

These bills deliver on the Albanese government's 2022 election commitment to deliver a transparent and trusted independent Australian CDC. Our government is committed to ensuring that Australians remain safe and healthy and that our country can be better prepared to face global health risks. I'm very happy to see that the CDC is on our list of agenda items because, being a member of the health committee, I understand just how important that is. I commend the bill to the House.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When Labor first took office in the term before this one, they came to power on the promise that they would be transparent and that there would be no secrets. 'Let the sunshine in,' they said, and the public believed them. The public took them at face value as to what they said they would do as far as accountability is concerned. Yet, time and time again, we are being faced with the prospect that this government is more secretive than any before it. That is a shame. Provisions within this particular bill, the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025, create many concerns around transparency and freedom of information.

We've heard in recent weeks that Labor now wants to put a cost on FOIs. I know that, when I was a minister in many portfolios, I had staff dedicated to just answering FOI submissions—mainly put forward by Labor shadow ministers. That's fair enough. We live in a democracy. Sometimes the request for information was just a try-on. More often than not, it was just political gameplay by Labor. My staff and department—the Department of Transport, Infrastructure and Regional Development—answered those queries in good faith, yet we knew that sometimes it was absolutely just political posturing by Labor. Yet now Labor wants to put a cost on those requests. Some might well say that this is a tax on truth, and it probably is.

In October last year, the Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing—someone who, I have to say, is not forthcoming with giving information—alleged that a lack of transparency had driven a decline in trust. This is the same minister who, when another member of parliament writes to him, gets his chief of staff to respond. I do not think that is good enough. I don't. I think that, if a member of parliament to a minister, their being from the other side of politics should not matter. The minister should have the decency to respond as a member of parliament to a member of parliament. But that doesn't happen. I shouldn't know the name of the chief of staff of the minister for health, quite frankly. I'm not about to put his name in Hansard; I don't believe that staff should be hauled before the House of Representatives. But I shouldn't be getting correspondence from the chief of staff; I should be getting it from the minister himself. Even if he just gives it a perfunctory glance and signs the bottom of the page, ministers should always read every bit of that correspondence—not just every line or every sentence but every word—but that doesn't happen with this particular minister.

Despite this clear recognition from the minister, this bill goes out of its way to stop information from being made public. That is indeed unfortunate, because it goes against the grain of what Labor said it would do when it came to office. That was to be more transparent, to be more accountable. Yet the opposite is the case. While the government claims the CDC's advice will be published by default, the devil is in the detail. It tells a different story. The director-general will have extraordinarily broad powers to withhold information. In this day and age, when the public is crying out for major parties and for the government of the day to be upfront and honest, the opposite is occurring. It's simply not good enough. It's not.

What we're seeing are vague and subjective terms that could be used to withhold almost any piece of information that the government finds to be an inconvenient truth. There are no clear appeal rights, and, again, this goes against the hallmarks of justice, the precepts of a fair go—all of those things that a democracy holds near and dear. There's no guarantee that the public or indeed the parliament—the people's House, the House of Representatives—will ever see the light of day when it comes to finding out information. It is terrible. It's not transparency. It's not accountability. It's not what Labor said it would do. And it is a shame because the public expect better. The public deserve better. And they're not getting it.

It's yet another attack on transparency and democracy from a government that wants to put accountability behind a paywall. I know the shadow Attorney-General has said this a number of times: it's a truth tax. And it's in this day and age, particularly from this government, which says it will hold everything to account, including itself. And they're doing exactly the opposite. And Labor member after Labor member comes in. They'll always have their carefully prepared notes, and they'll just read them like robots—probably AI driven. But the people who put Labor there expect better, and they're not getting it. It's such a shame.

Labor has had five years, almost, to make the case for this policy, prior to coming into government and since being in government. They have not successfully done so. We, perhaps for that reason alone, oppose this legislation. We believe it can go to a Senate inquiry. Labor can do what they like. They can. They have a 51 seat majority in this chamber. I understand that. It's numbers. 'We'll get it through this place.' But a Senate inquiry is necessary to delve into precisely what the implications of this particular legislation could involve.

On the broader question of disease control and being more prepared when—and hopefully it won't happen—another pandemic occurs, I have to say, the coalition's response to COVID-19 was first class. It was considered by the Johns Hopkins institute—

Hon. Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't laugh! Please do not laugh! It truly was. It was recognised by the Hopkins Centre as being the second-best in the world. There was no manual at the time that we could have pulled down from the shelf which said, 'This is what you do when you have a global pandemic,' because we hadn't had one for a hundred years, and the last one occurred just after the First World War.

Of course, conditions have vastly changed since the guns fell silent to end the Great War—and no war is great, as we know. But, of course, 11 November 1918 was an historic day. After that, our soldiers started to come back and, yes, they brought the Spanish flu and the pandemic of the day home with them. It cost millions of people their lives right throughout the world. Guns and disease and trench fever and all the rest had cost so many people their lives. We as a nation have just down the road a war memorial which has 60,000 names on it from the First World War; 60,000 of our best and bravest of the time had gone to fight in Europe in that conflict. In the Second Boer War before it, from 1899 to 1902, disease cost the lives of many more Australians than did bullets. This is a fact.

What we have to absolutely do, on both a health front and an economic front, is make sure we are prepared if there is going to be another pandemic. But what we did at that time in the Morrison government was make sure we saved lives and protected lives but also saved jobs and livelihoods. It galls me every time I hear a Labor member getting out their talking points from the Labor dirt unit, saying 'a trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt'. It was nowhere near a trillion dollars. The ABC fact check has made that very clear—nowhere near. Every time a Labor member stands and says that, they should then go and apologise for it, because it's not true. It's not right. It's not correct. But what we did do—

Don't laugh. I'm being deadly serious. You're new members of parliament; I get that. You can sit there and smugly say: 'Well, we've got a 51-seat majority. We can say what we like.' But it wasn't funny at the time, when the chief health minister said to a small executive leadership team of government—and I was included in that—that we could potentially lose 60,000 Australian lives if we didn't do something within weeks, and we did. I pay tribute to the prime minister of the day; to health minister Greg Hunt, member for Flinders; and to Josh Frydenberg, the treasurer of the day and member for Kooyong, for what they did to protect people and to protect jobs.

I'll tell you what else Greg Hunt did, and never was I prouder in this place than that time. He made sure that our remote Aboriginal communities were protected but also our Pacific friends. I'm glad that the Pacific minister is at the table, because I think in his heart of hearts he would acknowledge too that we went out of our way to make sure that vaccines were available in the blue Pacific, and we did save a lot of lives. Could we have done more at the time on so many levels? Yes, of course, but we didn't know what we didn't know.

But we were very lucky, very fortunate, to have an outstanding public servant in Steven Kennedy, secretary of Treasury, who had by some miracle in his university days and his days of studying done a paper on disease preparedness. With the lessons that he learned from the research that he did all those years ago, he was able to help guide Prime Minister Morrison and the others who were around that table at the time to make sure that we endeavoured to put the best decisions forward in the national interest.

You had people being buried on Manhattan Island in New York in public graves, and you had morgues filled to overflowing in Italy, such that they were using churches to cram coffins in. And they are two good health systems, the United States of America and Italy. We didn't see any of that in Australia, but elsewhere in the world, in places where there were good health systems, COVID was running rampant, and we were able to save so many Australian lives and protect so many Australian businesses. I make no apologies for what we did at the time. Every time Labor steps up and says, 'We're in a situation of debt because of the Liberals'—and the Nationals too, by the way; we're in a coalition—

Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the moment.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

See, you can hear it—just smug, just hubris. And it's not funny. It's serious, and I'm being deadly serious, because it was a deadly time. We lost so many lives, and we mourn for those thousands of Australians who did lose their lives because of COVID.

So disease preparedness is important, and that's why this legislation is important. And it should be important enough for every Labor member. Mind you, if it were a union piece of legislation, they'd all be in here talking, and they should be talking about disease preparedness. They should be talking about these sorts of things for the sake of their electorates and for the sake of the country, because it's important. Things such as this are important. This legislation should be rejected. It should be going to a Senate inquiry. It's too important not to.

Ash Ambihaipahar (Barton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. This bill responds directly to the recommendations from the COVID-19 response inquiry report released in October last year. It reflects on a health crisis that quickly became a crisis of information, trust and certainty. We are still dealing with the effects of a loss of trust in government and public health now.

Let me take you back to when I was seated on a couch in my pyjamas, a rapid antigen test on the counter beside me and the daily press conference on the TV—a time that no-one remembers very fondly. We tuned in to listen to the latest bungle of the Morrison government, be it vaccine rollout delays, the procurement failures, the crisis in aged-care facilities or the breakdown in quarantine arrangements. The now Minister for Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, said at the time that it was the biggest public policy failure in living memory. Australia's response to the pandemic was delayed, unresponsive and uncoordinated. It left many of us on the couch disappointed in the government of the day and frustrated that successive governments had not had the foresight to plan for such a public health crisis.

They say if you want something done you've got to do it yourself or you've got to be the change you want to see in the world. I'm proud to have swapped the couch for these plush benches and the PJs for a suit. The Albanese government has committed to ensuring that the Morrison government's failures will not happen again. One part of this commitment will be delivered through establishing the Australian Centre for Disease Control, or CDC, as recommended by the COVID-19 response inquiry report and delivered by this bill.

At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, most comparable countries had a body like the CDC and, because of that, the rest of the world's response, vaccine rollout and lockdowns were clearer and more effective than our own. We cannot lag behind next time a public health disaster strikes.

In this speech, I want to step through some of the key parts of the Centre for Disease Control and why they are important. These include: making the CDC a central, authoritative public health institution; having it provide better data and analytics; and publishing credible, accessible public health information. In examining these elements, we can see how transparency, accountability, efficiency and equity are at the heart of these reforms. These are words I find myself using again and again in this chamber because that's what our government stand for and what we strive to achieve in every piece of reform we introduce.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control will be an authoritative public health institution. Authority is not something you would say that the Morrison government had during the pandemic. They were all over the place. They ducked responsibility at every turn. It was 'not their job'. We all scratched our heads when the premiers recommended closing schools and the federal government did not, when three people were allowed to attend weddings but nine were able to join in outdoor group exercise. We had no clarity on what would end lockdowns, who should get what vaccine or when border restrictions would be lifted. I'm not saying that any one of these directives were right or wrong; they were simply confusing. This sort of confusion undermines confidence in our public health system. In times of crisis, we need clear, independent, timely and transparent decision-making. Otherwise, we risk people taking their health into their own hands and, ultimately, endangering the health of others.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control will rectify this gap in authority because it is independent. It need not worry about the politics of the day or the different priorities of state governments. Instead, it is a statutory agency that will act on scientific evidence and high-quality analysis built up over time. Of course, there will always be a place for politicians to lead people through a crisis, but, in doing so, this leadership should be based on evidence and effectiveness. The CDC will provide this strong, non-partisan basis.

In turn, it will partner with other Commonwealth agencies, state and territory governments, leading organisations in the scientific and research communities, peak bodies and community groups to navigate through these times of crisis. So waiting for the post National Cabinet press conference in the future may not feel like waiting for a new episode of MAFS to come out. Good government is not entertainment. It's measured, thoughtful, trustworthy and confident leadership. That is exactly what the CDC will achieve.

As a former scientist myself, the detail is in the data. Data is at its best when it's collated over time. One of the most important things about the Australian Centre for Disease Control is that it will begin operating on 1 January next year, not when the next pandemic happens, because much of the preparation for the next public crisis starts now. By the time illness breaks out we are already behind.

The CDC will ensure that experts, labs and governments are already working in step, speaking the same language, sharing real-time information. That preparedness will save time, money and, most importantly, lives. Moreover, the CDC will modernise Australia's national disease surveillance and data systems as a frontline defence against sickness. This includes rolling out a national wastewater surveillance program to detect emerging diseases. At the same time, it will contribute to whole-of-government responses to these same emerging threats. This means it will connect data from across hospitals, laboratories and even agriculture, to be certain that no one warning sign goes unnoticed. It's about prevention just as much as response.

All in all, this will provide a modern approach to national public health data to enable quicker and more-accurate detection of risk as well as more-consistent responses across borders and a strong foundation for pandemic planning and management. Again, this evidence based approach provides certainty to Australians. They can be sure that when a decision is made it is fair, effective and essential.

These were not common sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, people in the south-western parts of Sydney felt very unfairly targeted by area-specific lockdowns. One only needed to open their phone to see residents partying it up in Bondi, enjoying so much more of their freedom, breaking so many more restrictions than people living in south-west Sydney. It felt like our multicultural working and middle-class communities were being targeted while those on the beach side were living it up. The reasoning for these targeted lockdowns was poorly communicated, and it appeared as if there was a lack of evidence supporting the decision. As such, residents jumped to the conclusion that these lockdowns were yet another manifestation of discrimination by the coalition government.

The same story played out in remote communities that waited too long for vaccines, and in aged-care facilities that were left without proper PPE. In each case, the absence of clear, coordinated national leadership meant that people felt forgotten. Obviously such poor communication breeds resentment, disunity and noncompliance—all of this at a time when we should have felt like one country working together to get through the pandemic. On top of this we saw that when the data was delayed it cost lives. If Australia had faster genomic sequencing and clearer data sharing we could have contained outbreaks sooner and may have avoided many of the long, blunt tools like lockdowns and curfews that hurt families and small businesses.

The CDC will make sure that labs and states share their information and findings efficiently. In future, the CDC will be trusted to make equitable and effective decisions. Furthermore, the Australian Centre for Disease Control will publish credible, accessible public health information. This is essential to rebuilding trust that public health delivery will be done well and will be done right. Too many of us were scared by misinformation about Pfizer versus AstraZeneca or airborne versus surface-borne spread. We were scrambling with whispers of RATs posted on a Facebook community group. We were lining up for hours down on King Georges Road at Roselands waiting to do a test.

This bill explicitly frames the CDC as an authoritative source of public health advice and information. This puts it above the reaches of Scotty from marketing. Indeed, its mandated public function is to be above the spin. The interim CDC has already proven its dedication to this purpose. Last year it held public consultations, and in doing so the interim CDC stated that it understands that people have concerns about the way governments use their data. So they asked Australians to share their concerns and expectations. Such an open, genuine approach is essential to the idea of credibility and trust, because if we don't bring people with us we let conspiracy and misinformation bloom.

I think this is particularly important in CALD communities like mine. I remember, during the COVID-19 pandemic, poorly translated materials spreading like wildfire through group chats. People laughed at these government directives rather than following them. Then, in some cases, there was simply not any material available in translated form. Instead, family members were tasked with communicating complex but often contradictory messaging to their loved ones. Again, this created a lot of confusion. A lot of the time, this meant people were not following the actual public health advice. For advice to be credible, it must be context specific, informed by lived experience, accurate and efficient. The CDC will be dedicated to ensuring its advice embodies these principles.

As you can tell from my experience and what my electorate and, I'm sure, a lot of people across Australia have experienced, it is something we cannot go through again. My biggest concern is the amount of distrust and damage the coalition government did to the institution of the federal government and the public health system at a time when there was so much uncertainty—also letting down the state and territory leadership. The CDC is about never repeating the same mistakes that the coalition government made in the lead-up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is about restoring faith in the people to trust good, independent public health advice—restoring their trust in government—because this Labor government is proactively working to address this through the bill.

While those across the chamber want to gaslight the rest of Australia, we on this side of the chamber understand that it is about giving public health policy to the Australian people, making sure that we are prioritising that advice and policy and ensuring that it enshrines preparedness, trust and equity in its approach. It is yet another example of evidence based, fair and practical reform by this Labor government. That will always be our priority.

Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I visit a lot of beef farms as part of representing the electorate of Forrest. Frankly this chamber has the same sort of aroma in this debate—boy, oh boy, is there some revisionism going on. The member for Barton outlined that she was in her jimjams during the onset of the COVID pandemic in this country. My experience couldn't have been more different, because I was in a crisis management team for a large Western Australia corporate. I was running my own small business and, shortly thereafter, was just a short walk from here in the Senate chamber as part of the Morrison government and part of the response to a national crisis that I think that then deputy prime minister and member for Riverina very articulately described in this place just now.

This wasn't a sort of situation for our country where some cheap shots from the cheap seats from those opposite went unnoticed. In fact, if we step back through history, there's that little old thing called Hansard, which very accurately depicts what members of the Labor party were saying at the time—not what they're saying now. The reality is, first of all, that JobKeeper was a bad program. When it became clear it was a success and when then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg started to wind the program back in, displaying the fiscal prudence that I think we needed, Jim Chalmers, our Treasurer today, came out and said: 'No, no, no. We need to keep this program going.' The reality, of course, is that, as we wound that program back and employment in Australia reached record highs and unemployment dropped to record lows, somehow we still had it wrong. I think it's worth remembering these sorts of lessons as we consider the Labor government's proposal for the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025 that are in front of this chamber today, because it's always good to look at what Labor do not what Labor say they do.

These bills, in conjunction, would establish a new national body as a statutory, non-corporate Commonwealth entity. Those of us on the side of the House actually believe that governments run the country. Ministers of the Crown, being part of an elected government, make decisions. They take advice, of course. The member for Riverina described in detail today what it is like to sit around that table at a time of national crisis and receive frank and fearless advice from a world-class public service and to take into account that advice and make the decisions that will ultimately set our country's trajectory. I think the thing that's missing in this debate is a little bit—the member for Barton touched on data. Let's look at the data, because, at the time of trying to institute a US-style CDC in Australia, I distantly remember looking at freezer trucks on the streets of Manhattan full of dead Americans. That was at a time when the virus was not circulating in the Australian community. So I think it's just absolutely mad, to be honest, to look at a country that, in the initial stages of the pandemic, feared so badly and then use that as a case study for what we might institute in this country.

This is to be led by a director-general, appointed and reporting directly to the Minister for Health, and apparently it will be accountable to the federal parliament. No-one is more accountable to the parliament than the Prime Minister and the cabinet of the elected government of the day. Why is it that we also need to start fiddling with the Freedom of Information Act and the Biosecurity Act and making significant transfers of powers and functions between the department of health, the Chief Medical Officer and this proposed new entity? While strengthening the Australian public's health preparedness is of course a priority for any government, the mechanisms proposed in this bill and the considerable powers that they transfer warrant far closer examination than what's being ponied up by this government.

Apparently, this is a government that's more transparent than any other we've had, yet we know that we are also about to start talking about the truth tax and the clamping down on freedom of information—the further restrictions we've seen. The same mob over there are the ones imposing nondisclosure agreements before they'll sit down and talk to any stakeholders about proposed legislation. It's just outrageous. I say to the chamber: look at what the Labor Party do in government, not what they say they do in government.

They might have promised a US-style CDC five years ago. Yet, after all that time and coming into their fourth year in government, the Albanese government has only now brought this legislation to parliament, barely three months before the proposed start date. The very real question for the House is: why is it unreasonable for that legislation to go to a Senate inquiry? In my many conversations with members of the former government after the COVID pandemic had subsided on what lessons had been learned, a common refrain around this building was, 'I had no idea just how powerful the Biosecurity Act made a single person in our country.' When that legislation was debated in this place, persons who expressed unease about it were told: 'Don't to worry. It'll never happen.' It did happen, and extraordinary powers were conferred on a single person.

That sort of conferral should be the subject of rigorous parliamentary scrutiny and debate and extensive consultation with the Australian community. Yet here we are. No doubt, a dirty deal has been done with the Greens in the Senate, and this will be crunched through like everything else. But the question stands. If you are part of the most transparent government ever, if you do believe in the conventions of this place, why won't you refer this legislation to a Senate inquiry—not a stunt one but a proper one that goes around the country and collects the lessons learned from the pandemic to understand what happens when so much power is conferred into the hands of so few?

The government and their Greens allies on the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee have refused to hold a single public hearing inquiry into this bill. Look at what they do, not what they say they do. With over 40 submissions to the committee, with many proposing substantive amendments, the committee has simply denied experts and Australians any opportunity to be heard in the context of an open parliamentary inquiry. It's unacceptable and another example of a disturbing trend from this government to hide from transparency and to shrink from accountability. This Prime Minister was the one who said: 'I'm going to show up. I'm going to be accountable.' Yet, at every opportunity, it's roadblocks and confidentiality agreements. It's soon to be a truth tax, a fee for a simple freedom of information request. It shows that this government is more interested in political box-ticking than engaging in genuine consultation. When it comes to matters as profound for this country as the sorts of powers being conferred to the proposed CDC as they are, I fear greatly for where we are headed.

So there have been five years to make the case for this policy, and I reckon that, if I walk down the main street of any of the towns in my electorate, literally no-one in a hundred would tell me that this was a priority. I think no-one would tell me that they were aware of this proposal. If I spent five minutes chatting with them about exactly what was proposed, I have no doubt in my mind that they would consider our request to have an open inquiry into this to be very reasonable, because, far from it being designed in secrecy, shielded from transparency, designated with very significant powers and recently with an unclear role in the existing ecosystem of our health infrastructure, it just seems bizarre that we are being criticised for asking for a little light, a little time and a little consultation on this bill.

I'm very proud to be part of a Liberal-National opposition that will not be supporting these bills in the House in light of these unresolved concerns and prior to a full Senate inquiry into the bill, which is, frankly, critical to understand how the proposed CDC will operate, how its very serious powers will operate and how it will be accountable to the Australian parliament and the Australian people in the future. The Australian people deserve confidence that their public health institutions are effective, transparent and accountable. So much of what the member for Barton was banging on about in terms of lockdowns and confusion came from state governments. We've got to remember the states made the Commonwealth. There wasn't a single power that was ceded by the Commonwealth to the states in imposing the draconian limitations on very basic freedoms that we experienced across the country, and yet here we are contemplating just ramming through something that will confer those sorts of powers on a new, unknown and untested institution. It just seems to me to be truly bizarre.

So we're calling on the government to hold the hearing and to provide some answers—pretty simple stuff, really. When we're downgrading the role of the Chief Medical Officer and transferring the functions, powers and duties of the Director of Human Biosecurity to the secretary of the department, who is, let's face it, a bureaucrat—they're not elected. They're not accountable to the Australian people in the way that a minister of the crown or a decision-maker in government normally is. This is despite the Director of Human Biosecurity being a role that requires the medical expertise that the CMO possesses. This shift risks eroding public confidence in key health decisions by placing them in the hands of bureaucrats without a clinical background and risks undermining Australia's trusted CMO and Deputy CMO roles, which I think all reasonable people would agree performed effectively during the COVID pandemic.

While we're on the performance of state governments, it's worth noting that this is in the context of a health crisis in my home state of WA. September saw a new record for ambulance ramping at WA hospitals, and yet state and federal Labor governments—this government—are bickering with each other over who is to blame. Their focus, rather than on fixing the crumbling health infrastructure in Western Australia, is on this unknown, untested and, frankly, unclear organisation. I've had a local grandmother contact my office to voice her concerns after calling an ambulance in my electorate. After being stuck in the back of that ambulance for hours on the ramp outside the hospital, unable to get in, they finally were admitted and then were shifted between rooms three times on the first night.

To pretend that the priorities for Australian health are invoking an American-style CDC when there are these sorts of real problems—and I could go on all day about this—further underscores that we have to look at what the Labor Party does, not what it says. Professor Michael Kidd, who served as the Deputy CMO during the pandemic and has been appointed to the role of CMO under this government, which is an appointment the coalition supports in recognition of his strong contribution to our pandemic response, is going to be undermined by this CDC. We go from someone who has a track record and a clinical background, who has served his country with distinction in providing frank and fearless advice to governments during a time of crisis, to a faceless bureaucrat. It just doesn't make sense. When we look at the lack of transparency around this bill, there are, as I've said, serious concerns. In October last year, the Minister for Health alleged that a lack of transparency had driven a decline in trust. Easy to say, Minister! Despite that recognition, the bill goes out of its way to prevent information from being made public, which, again, underscores that you should look at what they do, not what they say they're doing.

While the government claims that the CDC's advice will be published by default—that sounds great in a news grab—the fine print tells a different story. The director-general will have extraordinarily broad powers to withhold information, including any advice that they consider might cause 'unreasonable risk of harm' or affect 'the integrity of other government processes'. If that does not set the scene for some sort of political cover-up, I don't know what does. These are vague and subjective terms that could be used to withhold almost any piece of information a future government might find inconvenient to publicly release. There are no clear appeal rights, no external oversight and no guarantee that the public or even this parliament will see the advice underpinning critical health decisions. This is not transparency. It is not an improvement. And it is not the sort of step that we should take as a country without public scrutiny, public consultation and a clear-minded conviction from this parliament that it is the right thing to do.

Let's not forget: we rank second in the world for pandemic and epidemic preparedness in the Johns Hopkins Global Health Security Index. Our pandemic response was described internationally as gold standard. While we support efforts to enhance our preparedness, we must do so in the recognition that our existing framework was world leading.

Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will be speaking about the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. It is clear that, through this bill, we will be fixing something that was shambolic before we came to government. The Albanese government are delivering on our commitment to the Australian people to deliver a transparent, trusted and independent national centre for disease control.

Before we came to government, Australia was the only OECD country without a CDC equivalent. As the COVID-19 response inquiry highlighted, Australia wasn't prepared for a pandemic. Because of the lack of planning, Australia's pandemic response to COVID was slow, confused and lacked authority. The COVID-19 inquiry called for an Australian CDC, and that is exactly what the Albanese government is delivering. The Australian CDC will strengthen public health capability, improve our preparedness for future pandemics and safeguard the health and wellbeing of all Australians. The Australian CDC will provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory government health agencies, international agencies such as the WHO and specialist non-government health organisations. It will be an authoritative source of public health advice and information for the public and for government officials working in public health. Importantly, it will support the better use of data and provide greater transparency of advice provided to governments.

This bill will establish the Australian CDC, to commence operations on 1 January 2026—next year—as an independent Commonwealth statutory agency. The establishment of the Australian CDC will ensure we are prepared and learn from the hard lessons of the pandemic to better protect the health and wellbeing of Australians. This bill will establish the Australian CDC in legislation to deliver its functions related to a broad range of public health matters, including preventing communicable disease spread, providing independent advice on public health risks, strengthening data and analytics capability and building its role as a trusted adviser to all governments on public health risks and threats.

The Australian CDC functions are expected to expand in the future and will respond to emerging public health risks. The Australian CDC will bring together critical information and experts to protect Australia from diseases and other threats to public health. It will provide high-quality analysis and advice on public health risks to governments and the Australian community—promoting and coordinating action to prepare for and respond to the risks. The Australian CDC will be led by a director-general and, subject to the passage of this legislation, will be operational from early next year.

Australia's CDC advice will be based on independent assessment of available evidence. The D-G will perform its functions at an arm's length from the government and is not subject to direction from ministers or government departments. Under this legislation all collection and use of personal information by the Australian CDC would need to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 as is appropriate. Data would be handled under strict safeguards—including limits on collection and sharing and de-identification wherever possible. The COVID-19 inquiry highlighted that Australia wasn't prepared for a pandemic and called for an independent CDC. That is exactly what our government is delivering by establishing a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control.

As the COVID-19 inquiry reported, Australia went into the COVID pandemic with no playbook for a pandemic, limited readiness of the National Medical Stockpile and badly stretched, aged and healthcare systems. The COVID-19 report noted:

The pandemic pushed our people, emergency response structures and communities to the limit and required rapid decision-making in times of great uncertainty.

Some critical gaps and lessons revealed in the health response to the pandemic can be addressed by rapidly progressing and funding the establishment of a new national authority dedicated to prevention and control.

The COVID-19 inquiry report, with a permanent Australian Centre for Disease Control, CDC—in future means that we would have a centre of expertise, an authoritative voice on disease prevention and control for Australia and evidence support for decision-makers in the Australian government and jurisdictions. We would have the technical expertise—in-house and through partnerships with research and academic organisations—to support a nationally coordinated approach to the collection, analysis and synthesis of real-time evidence. We would have rapid risk assessment of pandemic threat, disease hotspots and at-risk segments of the community. We would have the evidence to support decisions on the introduction, escalation and de-escalation of public health measures through the oversight and coordination of multi-way data sharing across jurisdictions and with Australian government and other organisations as appropriate.

A permanent Australian CDC means we would have rapid linkage of datasets. We would have evidence of population and health system-level impacts of the disease—acute and longer term sequelae—and of the performance of public health interventions to inform decisions on the extent and duration of interventions and the transition out of the pandemic response. We would also have an expanded One Health approach that considers the intersection between plant, animal and human biosecurity—linking departments, agencies and expertise to combat complex disease threats, including avian influenza. There would be a key contact point for international public health authorities for efficient intelligence sharing on emergency threats in health crises.

There would be an increased trust in public health interventions through the timely sharing and translation of evidence on effectiveness as part of a broader public health communications strategy on risk and the balancing of risks in a public health emergency. There would also be a coordinated investment in pandemic and public health leadership and training, advice to government on urgent research priority areas to provide the real-time evidence required in public health operational responses across jurisdictions and health risk assessments and scenario projections that support policy decisions. There would be living pandemic-specific guidelines adapted for the various health professions, workplaces and high-risk settings, including aged care and disability service providers and other high risk or otherwise impacted settings.

Further, the COVID-19 inquiry said that expeditiously establishing a fully operational CDC would provide Australia with a lasting legacy of the lessons learned about the central role that evidence plays in supporting a nationally cohesive and proportionate response and in supporting population trust in and engagement with those pandemic responses. Most importantly, perhaps, it will ensure oversight of national preparedness that will put us in a safer and more resilient place ahead of the next pandemic.

The COVID-19 inquiry recommended that the CDC be underpinned by the founding principles of multiway cooperative relationships with the states and territories as well as non-government organisations; complementing and enhancing existing health and emergency governance architecture; transparency, trust and independence—as I've already covered—which is insured with this CDC; and certainty of funding for investment in world-leading data sharing and surveillance systems. I acknowledge the outstanding and ongoing work of the department of health and ageing in bringing this CDC to fruition.

I commend this bill and, in closing, want to acknowledge all those health professionals, aged-care professionals, public health professionals and everyone who did their best during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were unprepared. We did not have a central, national CDC to make us more prepared and to make sure that we would have the best possible response to a national pandemic. As a result, our response was clearly not as good as it could have been. This legislation and a national CDC will go a long way to ensuring that we are much more prepared for the future. That is what the people of Australia deserve.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. This is essential and very important. These bills will establish the Australians Centre for Disease Control, a long overdue and essential step to strengthen our national public health preparedness. I actually called for this during the 2022 election, and the crossbench engaged with the Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing in the last parliament on the establishment of this agency. Key in that consultation process were discussions around, for example, where it should be based to make sure it genuinely is a national centre for disease control. I commend the government for implementing this as a matter of urgency during this term of government and for progressing this very important organisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how critical clear, science based communication, information and coordination are to policy responses. A CDC will play a vital role in preventing and responding to future pandemics and in addressing the growing health impacts of many other challenges, in particular from our changing climate. I very much support the amendments proposed by the member for Mackellar and the member for Kooyong because they will strengthen the transparency, integrity and focus of the CDC to ensure Australians can have trust in this very important institution.

I was in parliament during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I saw firsthand the upheaval within our communities and the frustration at the inconsistency across our country—it has a unique system; there were seven different policies across different states and territories—in our response to COVID-19. One of the things that will always stand out for me, and that I welcomed, was the fact that decisions of government, of premiers and of the Prime Minister were made with scientific evidence and fact. Those images of doctors and chief medical officers standing next to premiers and the Prime Minister to inform advice absolutely helped save lives. They built the social licence and the acceptance from the vast majority of our communities in such incredibly difficult and important times. Australians overwhelmingly accepted curtailing their freedoms on the basis of expert medical advice to keep the more vulnerable in our communities safe, and that was so incredibly important.

I have to note that, while I know the nation had the effort of her expertise, in particular the community in Warringah and I had the assistance of the incredible Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, an extraordinary epidemiologist who gave clarity and calm amid chaos. She was an invaluable source of information and support for me personally, for the Warringah community and, I think, for Australia at large, helping us understand such complex facts and situations. She helped us understand what was happening and why and what we could do to mitigate it. She took the time to explain the complex concepts in clear terms. She helped to keep the community informed and calm during a time of turbulence and uncertainty. Her loss is very deeply felt. This bill in many ways honours her legacy of science based, transparent public health leadership.

I would also like to thank, from my office, Julie Giannesini, an electorate officer in my team who has been with me for six years. She worked tirelessly during the COVID pandemic to assist so many people within my community with urgent visas and exemption requests around business and personal travel arrangements, sick parents, attending funerals, and people stranded around the world. Her incredible work was recognised and appreciated by so many in my community. I want to make sure that is on the record.

Of course, so many helped during that time. The frontline services and health professionals that worked tirelessly around the clock really showed just how much we as a society need to value the importance of those frontline services and health professionals. Before COVID-19, Australia's public health system was largely state based and fragmented. I think COVID-19 really exposed the gaps in not having a single coordinated body. While we fared better than many other nations, it was due to an evidence based direction informed by our top medical officers. I know that wasn't always easy, so I very much thank them.

The health impacts of climate change are among the most significant and growing threats facing Australians. I dearly wish for the same scientifically backed approach that we took with COVID-19 to be taken with other risks, particularly in relation to climate change and the risk to health that that poses. I call on the government to ensure that this is also the focus of the CDC, because the national climate risk assessment highlights that climate change will have a severe impact on our health and social support system by as early as 2050 unless we can mitigate and address it and invest in preparation for it. Heatwaves are an enduring feature of Australia's climate and have significant social, health and economic impacts. Rising temperatures are increasing the incidence of heat related illnesses, cardiovascular stress and dehydration, especially among older Australians, outdoor workers and the more vulnerable. In New South Wales, heat related deaths may rise by some 444 per cent under the scenario of an increase of three degrees, which we are, sadly, on track for. Bushfire smoke and other air pollution are driving higher rates of respiratory disease and asthma. So it's clear that, if we want a comprehensive health approach, these issues have to be addressed by the CDC as well.

Establishing an Australian CDC provides an opportunity to build a proactive, integrated and independent health protection system. For this to be effective, we must ensure that it is science led, nationally coordinated, future focused, community connected and globally engaged. To do this, the implementation will be the key. The CDC must be properly funded and staffed by qualified public health professionals. It must have robust independence and transparency over appointments to ensure integrity and build trust with the community around its work and effectiveness.

We have seen the impact of politicisation of appointments to the CDC in the United States. The appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr to head of health has replaced science with ideology, and the ripple effect of this will negatively impact the health of Americans and will be felt for years, but it will also have an impact in Australia and around the world. We're seeing the withdrawal of funding from science and research, and that will have catastrophic consequences for so many. So it's so important that this CDC, to genuinely serve the Australian people, be robustly independent of the government of the day so that there can be no question of public service in terms of the public interest and better good. It has to be fearless advice.

We must have the ability to invest in data integration, which is already contemplated in the bill, to ensure the linking of environmental health and demographic data to provide early warning systems to emerging health threats. Of course, we also need to be mindful that First Nations Australians need to be a priority in these considerations, working alongside these communities to recognise the unique challenges First Nations Australians face in relation to their health and in relation to environmental change and health resilience. It is critically important that special consideration be given.

Finally, public communication must be a cornerstone. Clear, consistent and accessible communication is vital. It must be available to all communities in all languages to make sure we truly have a CDC that works for the multicultural and diverse Australia. All communities, all Australians, must have confidence that the CDC is working and really looking out for everyone's health.

Ultimately, this bill establishing a CDC is about lessons learned. The pandemic showed us what happens when science, communication and community willpower align. It also showed what happens when we don't—fear, confusion and division. The next crisis might look different, but the principle remains the same. The bill is a step forward towards embedding that preparation in our national framework, and so I commend the bill to the House.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. These bills deliver on a key Albanese Labor government election commitment to establish an independent Australian centre for disease control and responds to recommendations from the COVID-19 response inquiry report released in October 2024, a landmark inquiry. It was established by our government in September 2023 to consider the Commonwealth's responses to the pandemic, including vaccination and financial support. This is because we thought it was important to be transparent about the response from a Commonwealth point of view to COVID-19 and how we managed it and the lessons we can learn to inform better management of future public health emergencies.

That inquiry found that Australia was one of the most successful nations in its pandemic response, but, as a country, our preparedness left a lot to be desired. I can recall that back in the 1980s people were talking about an Australian centre for disease control in response to HIV and AIDS, and I'm pleased to see this legislation before the chamber today. It has taken a while, but I think it's a matter of good public policy and a matter of necessity.

That's why it's so puzzling that those opposite are opposed to this. We've seen them rail against tertiary education. They don't like TAFE, the way they go on—they think we shouldn't be providing free TAFE. They don't like properly funding the university sector. The arts seem something that they think is an optional extra. Climate science seems like something that they don't believe in. Now it seems that health science and its efficacy are at risk of being something they deny. They don't like medical research, and they don't seem to support the idea that we should prepare ourselves. This was a once-in-100 experience that we had with COVID-19.

But those opposite also, when I listen to their speeches relating to this bill, seem to forget that they were in government at the time and that the National Cabinet was something that was initiated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. I think they also seem to forget that, when the colonies formed the Federation in 1901, premiers were powerful. The states were still powerful. We might have had some changes with respect to the financial capacities between the Commonwealth and the states on income tax, and I'm not going to go through the High Court decisions there. We might have seen cooperative federalism. We might have seen the Commonwealth government having greater powers through High Court decisions—sometimes High Court decisions frustrated Labor governments; Ben Chifley could talk all about that. But, when it comes to issues of the Constitution, it is very specific about the Commonwealth's power under section 51 of the Constitution. The states have primary responsibility for the delivery of public health services through hospitals and are in control of their state borders. I don't understand Gough Whitlam talking about rail gauges, but the state governments have enormous power, and during the pandemic we were reminded of the power of the premiers.

But those opposite seem to think there were no LNP or Liberal and National party premiers dealing with a Liberal prime minister. They have criticised us on transparency and accountability during their speeches on this bill. It's a bit galling that those who brought us robodebt and a prime minister that actually put himself into multiple ministerial portfolios criticised us in relation to gag issues. They're the party that gagged nearly every charitable organisation they could possibly fund. If you weren't gagged and didn't sign up, you couldn't get funding. That was what prime ministers Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison presided over. We had lectures during this debate about all these issues as if they have some sort of political amnesia, as if they never formed government from 2013 to 2022.

We've got a bill before the chamber today that those opposite claim they're not going to support. That denialism seems so evident, so obvious, in their fractured factional thinking, with Liberal against Liberal, National against National, Liberal against National. It's there in the speeches we heard in this chamber yesterday and today. This legislation is absolutely good public policy and deserves to be supported by everyone in this chamber. Now, the crossbenches have some amendments that they want to bring in, and it's their province and their right as parliamentarians to bring those amendments forward. But those opposite have railed against this legislation here. They took a policy to the last election opposing this legislation. It's as if the consequences of that election had no impact on their thinking not just on climate but also on disease control and management. It's as if they completely forgot about what happened in May 2025. They must have thought they weren't in power before May 2022.

This legislation is absolutely vital, and we must do better if we're faced with a pandemic in the future. The doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, the aged-care workers, the teachers, the couriers, the truck drivers, the logistics workers who I met during the pandemic, in my community of Blair in South-East Queensland, are heroes. The council workers who did so much great work during that time, the retail workers who suffered such shocking abuse by people who misbehaved terribly in places like Woolworths, Drakes, Coles et cetera—they are the heroes of the pandemic as well, and we should honour them and thank them for what they did. They got us through. It was a tough time. In aged care, anyone who's had a loved one or a friend die and was denied the opportunity or had limited opportunity to go to the funeral, anyone who was denied opportunity to go to a family member's or friend's wedding—we faced those challenges as a family as well.

Thousands of Australians lost their lives, while many had their livelihoods severely impacted. I know businesses, workers and community groups in my electorate were profoundly affected. Let me give you one example. A JBS—the meatworks—in my electorate, which is the biggest private employer in the Ipswich region, experienced a perfect storm during COVID. Market conditions were compounded by the Chinese government's beef import ban, widely seen as a retaliation for former prime minister Morrison's call for an investigation internationally into COVID. As a result, the plant had to cut back from two shifts to one. Six-hundred jobs, Member, were lost because of your side of politics. Six-hundred people lost their jobs in my local communities. So don't give us this nonsense about how wonderful Prime Minister Morrison was.

To add insult to injury, the Morrison government refused to allow JBS meatworkers to access JobKeeper wage subsidies—a devastating blow for those workers. When I asked a question of Prime Minister Morrison in question time, he said, 'They can go and get JobSeeker.' They couldn't keep their jobs. That was the failure of those opposite. It was an awful time for people, and it was a real time. Borders were closed. Australians were asked to stay in their homes, quarantining at home or in a hotel when they went across state and territory borders. We all went through it. Unless you're an ACT MP or senator, we all had to do that at some stage. For Anzac Day services, which are so important for Australians, we celebrated a moment of remembrance outside in our driveways.

The inquiry found that an economic response to the pandemic was critical to achieving the desired public health outcomes. Mistakes were made. There were frustrations and inconsistencies. We know that; people experienced it. We know, as parliamentarians, that happened for all of us. Modelling cited in the report I referred to said peak inflation could have been reduced by at least two per cent if the economic policy settings during the pandemic had better matched the public health restrictions. Global supply of stocks contributed to a substantial increase in inflationary pressures in our economy and are still having an impact on it. The impact was compounded by poor policy choices from the Morrison government.

The inquiry report and the progress we have made are proof of this government's economically responsible management. We focused on fighting inflation, delivering responsible economic cost-of-living relief and fixing budgetary health problems. But we know, as a key finding of the inquiry, that Australia went into the pandemic with no playbook, badly stretched health and aged-care systems, no clear national management plan and deficiencies in the National Medical Stockpile. Can I say, as a Labor politician, I really felt from time to time, rightly or wrongly, that there was some politicisation when it came to the distribution of vaccinations. That's how I felt from time to time.

The review showed gaps in data and data-sharing between the Commonwealth and states, as well as fragmented, outdated planning and preparation for health emergencies. Shockingly, when we came to government, we were the only country without a CDC equivalent in the OECD. Now, even more shocking was the fact the former government had not led a national pandemic drill for 12 years. We were hopelessly and woefully underprepared for the COVID pandemic. Our response was confused, slow and lacked authority. And I might add, as I said before, that the Morrison government botched the rollout of the vaccinations. The inquiry warned we mustn't let this happen ever again. Infectious disease outbreaks, AMR, climate change, changing geopolitical tensions and other things have all impacted on our national health security, and they all demand a permanent national public health authority right now.

Hence, one of the central recommendations of the independent COVID inquiry, which those opposite are ignoring again, is a new Australian centre for disease control. That's exactly what this legislation is doing. Back in October 2020, in opposition, we committed ourselves to a transparent, trustworthy and independent CDC consistent with the outcome of the inquiry. When we came to government, we established an interim Australian CDC in January 2023 to immediately improve the way we prepare for and respond to health emergencies. When you listen to what they say, it's almost as if those opposite didn't know that—as if somehow nothing happened when we got to government except this legislation. We've established an interim CDC within the health department. In October last year we announced that we would invest $251.7 million to deliver the CDC over four years to 2027-28. On top of that, we've committed $73.3 million in ongoing funding from 2028-29 to enable the ongoing operation of the centre.

This bill, along with the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill, delivers an independent statutory agency that will bring critical information experts to protect Australia from diseases and other public health threats. And those opposite today, when given the opportunity, will vote against it. The Australian CDC will provide high-quality analysis and advice on public health risks to government and the Australian community. It will streamline our public health data-sharing and linkages across the Commonwealth, state and territory governments.

Australians deserve public health data, insights and advice that's high quality, nationally consistent and responsive, not just a crisis every day—and not just when a crisis happens on a Liberal Party watch; it should be available when it happens under a Labor Party government as well. The new centre promotes coordinated action to prepare for and respond to public health risks. I mean, the National Cabinet that Prime Minister Morrison presided over was all about that, but those opposite seem to have forgotten that and don't want that National Cabinet approach.

A transparent, trusted and independent CDC will strengthen our public capacity to respond, improve our preparedness, and safeguard the health and wellbeing of all Australians. We're safeguarded in many ways by that green Medicare card and by a public health system at a state and territory level that we fund, and the federal government puts a four in front of the amount of money we give to the states and territories, in terms of percentage.

But we can do better, and the missing link in our preparedness and prevention is the CDC. Today we've got an opportunity to vote for it, and those opposite are going to vote against it.

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. This bill establishes the long-promised Australian Centre for Disease Control, a national body to strengthen our ability to prepare for, prevent and respond to health threats. The new CDC will consolidate functions that are currently scattered across the Department of Health and various public health agencies. It will improve coordination between the Commonwealth, state and territories; strengthen surveillance systems; and provide clear, science based advice to governments and the community.

This is a reform that Australia has needed for some time. During COVID-19 we saw how fragmented the public health system was, with each state making decisions in isolation and the Commonwealth struggling to coordinate national responses. We also saw how valuable timely, trusted information could be in maintaining public confidence. A strong, independent CDC can help us do better next time.

But let's be clear. This reform is well overdue. We have been talking about the need for an Australian CDC to be established for almost 40 years. We are the only OECD country to not have a CDC or equivalent body. The government committed to establishing an Australian Centre for Disease Control before the 2022 election, yet we only saw an interim CDC within the department established in January 2024 and are now only just seeing legislation to bring an independent CDC formally into being.

Australians deserve a public health system that is proactive, not reactive. The truth is that prevention and preparedness have too often been the poor cousins of acute care. Australians spend less than two per cent of our total health funding on prevention, compared with more than five per cent in countries like Canada and New Zealand. This is a false economy and it is also wrong for the health of Australians around the country. Every dollar in prevention saves many more dollars in future health costs, and it saves lives.

We have an ageing population. We will have increasing pressures on our healthcare system. Investment in prevention, in living well for longer, is what will maintain the quality of life but also help us manage growing demands on our healthcare system. The Grattan Institute has made this point clearly in its research. The national CDC is an essential platform for shifting our health system towards prevention. It could lead to nationally coordinated efforts on chronic disease, obesity, smoking, alcohol, mental health and vaccination, areas where progress has stalled because responsibilities are split and leadership is lacking.

But this is where I would like to come to some of the challenges of where the government is at the moment, because chronic diseases are only going to be considered after an independent review in 2028. The prevention of chronic non-communicable diseases should be recognised as a core component of the CDC's scope from the initial development of the organisation. I think this is really important. Again, when you look at it from an economic point of view, where, increasingly, is the cost burden in terms of our healthcare system? It is in chronic diseases. That is why the CDC is an opportunity, and that is why putting off including chronic diseases until 2028 is a false economy by the government.

So, while I do support this bill, I want to emphasise that passing it is only the first step. What matters now is how quickly and effectively the CDC becomes operational. It must be genuinely independent, with the ability to provide frank advice to government and to the public, and it must have secure long-term funding. To be effective, it needs to attract and retain the best scientific and public health talent, including through partnerships with universities, state health agencies and international bodies, because we don't need another body that sits on the sidelines; we need a CDC that can drive a cultural shift, that focuses on prevention, that can improve data and transparency and that is going to help Australians live longer and healthier lives and also ensure that we can afford health care. After years of promises, the government must now move with urgency to make this happen. Every year of delay means more preventable disease, more pressure on hospitals and more cost to families and taxpayers alike. The COVID pandemic taught us that the cost of being unprepared is measured not only in dollars but in lives and in livelihoods. The Australian people deserve a system that learns these lessons. The Australian Centre for Disease Control can be that system, but only if it is empowered to act boldly and independently and only if the government matches words with actions, including in its remit.

Sam Lim (Tangney, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 will establish the Australian Centre for Disease Control, the CDC. This delivers on a commitment made by the Albanese Labor government to Australians: to establish a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control. Before we came to government, Australia was the only OECD country without a CDC equivalent. We saw highlighted in the Commonwealth Government COVID-19 Response Inquiry that Australia wasn't prepared for a pandemic.

There is much support for the establishment of an Australian CDC. Many consumers and health peak bodies, as well as infectious disease experts and researchers, support the establishment of an Australian CDC. I have spoken with researchers in my electorate of Tangney who are also in support of establishing an Australian CDC.

I support the establishment of an Australian CDC in part due to my own experiences working on the COVID-19 response. I was working as a frontline police officer with the WA Police Force when COVID-19 happened. Because of my connections with Perth multicultural communities and my different language skills, I was tasked to work on the Western Australian COVID-19 response. At the time, we were facing low vaccination rates, especially in many of the multicultural communities, because people were scared and confused. They did not have the correct information from a single, independent and transparent voice. Misinformation was everywhere, and it was especially challenging for multicultural communities. Some communities believed the misinformation and were refusing to get vaccinated as it went against their beliefs. I helped translate correct information into different languages and then I worked to disseminate information about the importance of getting vaccinated. I had the trust of the grassroots organisations, and so, together with some very good colleagues, we worked to get the message out. As a result of the combined effort of the WA Police Force, Health and government, we increased the vaccination rate from less than 50 per cent to almost 80 per cent and then improved it again to 90 per cent. Our work involved providing the correct information. We explained the evidence based information and we worked closely with the communities to make sure people understood the health advice about vaccinations.

Our small team was called the 'COVID vaccine command' and it was led by the then police commissioner, now our governor of WA. He tasked my very good friend Inspector Don Emanuel-Smith and I to be in his team to fight the misinformation and people's fear of coming forward to get vaccinated. Everywhere I went, I dragged my good supervisor, Inspector Don Emanuel-Smith, with me, and the two of us did a lot of multicultural outreach in WA. Our outreach effort included working with community places, such as the mosques, the temples, the churches, the gurdwaras, the community centres and the peak body associations, and sharing the latest medical advice and the importance of vaccination. We listened to the concerns of the community and helped them understand the accurate information that was based on health advice and from sources they could trust. We spoke to them in their languages and we tried to allay their fears. We brought doctors and nurses directly to the communities. I'm proud that these efforts made a positive contribution to protect the health and welfare of people being harmed by COVID.

On the front line, we were working very hard. It also felt like we were working fast, but this was because we were playing catch-up. Because of the lack of planning, Australia's pandemic response to COVID was extremely slow and confused and lacked authority. An Australian CDC can help change this, and it will help us improve our preparedness. This bill will establish the Australian CDC in legislation to deliver its functions related to a broad range of public health matters. This includes preventing communicable disease spread, providing independent advice on public health risks, strengthening data and analytics capability, and building its role as a trusted adviser to all governments on public health risks and threats. The Australian CDC will provide evidence based public health advice to governments, state and territory government health agencies, international agencies—for example, the World Health Organization—and specialist non-government health organisations as well. It will be an authoritative source of public health advice and information for the public and for government officials working in public health. An Australian CDC will help strengthen Australia's public health capability and ultimately how we can look after all Australians.

When I reflect on my time working on the COVID response, I see that some of the difficulties we had were due to the lack of authority. People felt they didn't have an authoritative voice to trust, so they were listening to different people telling them different pieces of information. People didn't know what information was correct, and they didn't know who to turn to. This led to confusion and misinformation that spread like wildfire.

Combined with other barriers, these challenges were especially difficult to solve for culturally and linguistically diverse communities. We did solve them, but I think, had we had a trusted voice like what is being proposed with the Australian CDC, that this would have been easier, faster and more effective. It took a lot of work to provide people with the correct information that was based on evidence and data. It required my colleagues and me to work closely with multicultural communities where we had already built trust and established a good bond. Only then would people listen to what we were saying. It required a lot of effort to persuade people to listen to the health advice. This is why I believe having a trusted, independent authority will make a difference.

An Australian CDC will help combat some of the confusion and provide that authority that we need. It will help support confidence. While my focus during the COVID-19 response was on multicultural communities, I believe many other communities and disadvantaged groups of people could have also benefited from having this trusted voice. An Australian CDC will also support the better use of data and provide greater transparency of advice provided to the governments. Australia has great expertise and great talents to do this important work.

I also want to speak a little bit about the Australian National Phenome Centre, which is in my electorate of Tangney. This centre was established in 2019 and is linked to Murdoch University, which is also in my electorate of Tangney. I was recently at the Phenome Centre, where I learned more about the centre's current work, including the world-leading work it did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shortly after it was established, the Phenome Centre was deployed to study COVID-19. It generated important work in COVID-19, including being one of the first groups in the world to recognise COVID-19 as a multisystem inflammatory disease. This was done through the deep phenotyping of patient samples, some of which were collected from Fiona Stanley Hospital. The centre collaborated with other universities on world-leading studies to better understand the virus and conducted research into the effects of long COVID.

The centre is also committed to public health and solving problems of global significance. The centre is one of the best equipped metabolic laboratories in the world, and, on my recent visit, I saw some of the ultrahigh-resolution instruments for precision medicine and personalised health research. I also learned about the centre's focus on animal health diseases and zoonotic diseases, which forms part of the university's holistic view of looking at diseases, and their approach to infectious disease surveillance, management and control.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 will establish the Australian CDC, to commence operation in just a few months, on 1 January 2026. It will be an independent Commonwealth statutory agency. Establishing the Australian CDC in such a way will ensure it remains independent and cannot be subjected to direction from ministers or government departments. My experience of working with multicultural communities shows that this independence is very important.

The establishment of the Australian CDC will ensure that we are prepared and can better protect the health and wellbeing of all Australians. As I mentioned earlier, our hard work did manage to improve vaccination rates during COVID-19. However, I believe that, had we been better prepared from the beginning, our outreach work would have been much easier to deploy. The Australian CDC's functions are expected to expand in the future and will respond to emerging public health risks. As someone who was on the frontline of the COVID-19 response and as someone who every day fought to combat misinformation, I believe establishing the Australian CDC is very important and crucial. I am proud to support this bill and be part of an Albanese Labor government that is delivering on its commitment to a transparent, trusted and independent centre for disease control.

Debate adjourned.