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

I rise today to call for an increase in funding for the Medical Research Future Fund for Australian and medical research. The Canadian psychologist Stephen Pinker described his favourite sentence in the whole English language. It was the start of a Wikipedia page that read 'smallpox was an infectious disease'—was. A disease that caused millions of deaths has been completely eradicated. Medical research is one of humanity's greatest success stories. Over the past few centuries we developed antibiotics, vaccines and public health systems that have transformed our lives. Life expectancy has soared and infant mortality has fallen. But there is still so much more to do. Every family in Australia has been touched by illness, by cancer, dementia, diabetes or rare genetic conditions. Continued investment in medical research is vital to saving and improving lives. I'm proud to represent a community, Curtin, that punches well above its weight in medical research. Curtin is home to the University of Western Australia, the Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research, the Parent Institute, the Kids Research Institute, the Raine Medical Research Foundation, the Ear Science Institute, the Lions Eye Institute and a number of other medical research institutions.

WA has been responsible for seven of the 17 Australian drugs that have been approved by the US FDA but we only receive four per cent of federal medical research funding. It was researchers in Curtin who first identified the toxic amyloid beta protein that causes Alzheimer's disease, which affects 30 per cent of older Australians. Alzheimer's Research Australia, based in Curtin, is continuing the fight against Alzheimer's through groundbreaking work on how we can slow cognitive decline. But despite their incredible work, they have only received limited funds from the MRFF simply because of the cap on MRFF spending.

More broadly, researchers in Curtin have had products rated highly by the MRFF but turned down simply because of the funding cap. This includes research into rare childhood diseases, Indigenous children's health, diabetes, heart disease detection and cancer therapy. These are exactly the kinds of projects the MRFF was created to support. Get this: the funding cap is arbitrary. The MRFF was established with bipartisan support to provide a sustainable funding stream for life-changing medical research. It's grown into a $24 billion fund yet it disperses only around $650 million each year, which is far less than originally intended. The coalition, when it created the MRFF, envisioned spending a billion dollars a year once the fund reached maturity at $20 billion. We have passed the milestone, and that's why I'm here backing the call from the member for Kooyong to increase disbursements to a billion dollars a year. It's time to unlock the potential of the MRFF to back researchers in Curtin and across Australia who are working every day to change lives.