Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Macdonald has raised a matter on behalf of Queensland. I want to raise a matter which will also affect New South Wales hospitals. It goes to the very heart of the actuarial assumptions behind the levy and behind the fees charged by private healthcare organisations. It is the commercialisation and monopolisation of cancer susceptibility genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2. As the government knows—and it does not know what to do about it—the ASX announced on 11 July that Genetic Technologies Ltd had made a commercial decision to enforce the rights granted to it under an exclusive licence from Myriad Genetics in America. What this means is that all laboratories testing for breast cancer in Australia—and prostate cancer will follow because there is a patent out there on the gene technology—are going to be centralised and monopolised. I wonder what effect that is going to have on the actuarial assumptions behind this levy? Senator Conroy is scratching his head because the government does not know the answer to this either.

Genetic Technologies Ltd said in 2003 that they would give this patent to the Australian people. They are now going to enforce the patent on the Peter MacCallum institute in Melbourne and, to avoid litigation, they want all the Peter MacCallum institute’s testing done through their laboratory. A spokesman for the Auckland District Health Board—and I would like the government to explain this in view of the actuarial assumptions behind the levies—said:

The Australian government had told the MacCallum clinic—

that is, in Melbourne—

to continue testing and had promised it would be indemnified for any dispute over the intellectual property rights of this gene technology.

I will not take up the time of the committee much further. My question is: has consideration been given to the long-term implications of giving non-protein, as well as protein, gene patents to private companies around the planet? In Canada it has doubled the price of testing. In America, Myriad have gone into ultimate wide screening at a huge impost on the cost of health care. In the specific case of BRCA1 and BRCA2, the cost of the tests will affect every woman in Australia who has breast cancer. I think it is a disgrace. The government ought to have the guts to say, ‘We’re not going to tolerate this,’ and do something about it, given that Genetic Technologies Ltd said in 2003 they would give it to the people of Australia and New Zealand and are now, in a monopoly situation, going to charge them. It is a disgrace.