Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Health Minister, the Life-saving List campaigners have taken Australia's bone marrow donor registry from 168,000 to nearly 190,000. Three years ago, you said Australia had not moved fast enough to help blood cancer patients find donors and promised action to grow the registry. In these three years, Australia has lost 18,000 lives, 20 people a day. For many, including my nephew Liam, it is too late. Minister, have you really done everything you can to reverse Australia's continuing failure to meet our international obligations in this area?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Kennedy for the question and for his long interest in this as a member of parliament but also as a member of a family who have suffered grief and loss, with the loss of Liam a couple of years ago. Speaker, I repeat your acknowledgement of the presence of Josephine and Rachelle and other campaigners for the Life-saving List in this chamber. They'll be joining you in your courtyard. Thank you, Speaker, for hosting the event tomorrow on World Blood Cancer Day. I know the member for Kennedy and many other members on both sides of the chamber have campaigned for a better blood stem cell donor list.

The member for Kennedy is right to say that, a few years ago, I did acknowledge that Australia should be doing better here. We were then and are still one of the smaller stem cell donor registries of all developed countries. I said, after the member's question a few years ago, that I would take to health ministers a proposal to increase funding to the relevant organisations to undertake additional activity to recruit new stem cell donors to that registry. We did do that. We did release additional funds, and there has been an immediate impact from those activities, with double-digit growth in donor recruitment in 2024. This financial year in 2025-26, which is still not finished, the registry has expanded by almost 30 per cent.

But you're right to say that there's more that we should be doing. The registry is still relatively small, and I look forward to hearing more ideas at tomorrow's events. You have asked me, Member for Kennedy, before and since, whether we would consider expanding the age limit for new registrants to age 40. As you know, the clinical advice is that donations from younger donors is clinically superior, which is why the current limit is 35 years of age. That is the age limit for new donor registrants. But balanced against that, frankly, is our need to make the donor base as wide as possible. Ultimately, though, this has to be based on clinical advice, and, as it happens, the department only earlier this week issued a tender for those services to go back out to market. We'll see who wins that tender. But I can undertake to go back to health ministers, first of all, to review the progress we've made and what else we can do and, particularly, to direct the new provider to seek clinical advice about whether we should lift that age limit to 40 from 35 and undertake and progress any other ideas that come from this really important community based campaign, Life-saving List.