Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to reflect on Australia's handling of HIV-AIDS. In the 1980s we took action in the face of strident conservative opposition. That action saved lives. Today, on World AIDS Day, it deserves to be recognised.

In 1981 HIV first appeared in the United States. By 1982, Australia had its first HIV diagnosis. In 1984 we recorded our first death from AIDS. Over the coming decades, our experience would be very different from that of the United States. In 1983, Australia and the United States had roughly comparable rates of HIV transmission and AIDS cases. More than 30 years later, Australia's HIV prevalence rate is less than half that of the United States.

The difference was Australia's ethos of harm minimisation. A decision was made to treat HIV-AIDS as a disease caused by a virus, not a punishment for moral failings. This was not an inevitable decision. It required political courage from the Hawke government and especially the then health minister, Neal Blewett.

As the number of cases grew in Australia, fear also grew. The virus struck marginalised groups: gay men, drug users and sex workers. These were people whose rights were new or limited and whose acceptance by mainstream Australia was fragile. The early eighties tested that acceptance. Against this backdrop, the government of the day heard from two schools of thought. One saw at-risk groups as sources of contagion and suggested punishment, quarantine and other repressive measures for gay men, sex workers and injecting drug users. The other school of thought sought to engage at risk communities, to educate and to encourage behaviours that could help prevent further infection. The then Minister for Health, Neal Blewett, led the Hawke government in choosing to engage with and support affected communities and to work in partnership with them. That response saved lives.

Australia's response to HIV-AIDS relied on both political leadership and organised affected communities. These groups learned about the disease, lobbied government and educated their peers. Their work alongside doctors, health and social workers decisively reduced new HIV transmission rates in the period before a national program could be put in place. It is to the credit of the then government and, indeed, to all Australia's political leaders that it then supported these efforts when there was significant public support for more repressive measures. Polls in 1986 and 1987 found that a quarter of people favoured quarantine and half supported mandatory testing of gay men, injecting drug users and sex workers.

In 1987, the very same year as that poll, the then government opted to support a very different package of preventative measures. These included ads, including the Grim Reaper campaign; needle exchanges and methadone clinics; free, anonymous and universal HIV testing; and subsidised access to treatment under the new Medicare scheme. This approach ran counter to the approach in the United States, where policies that acknowledged the reality of homosexuality and the existence of drug use were rejected. Almost one million Americans contracted HIV whilst Ronald Reagan was president.

Australia's policies worked. Annual rates of new HIV transmissions halved between 1988 and 1998. It is estimated that if Australia had experienced America's levels of HIV and AIDS prevalence over the past few decades more than 120,000 more Australians would have HIV and more than 50,000 additional Australians would have AIDS. Neal Blewett and the first generation of HIV-AIDS activists did the hard work of making this country's response to the virus something we can be proud of. There are many thousands alive today because of it.

Even so, thousands have died, and today we remember them and extend our sympathy to their loved ones. We honour their memory by persisting in our efforts to eliminate stigma and pursue evidence based responses to HIV and AIDS. We honour that courage and foresight of those early political and community leaders who pioneered Australia's response—a response I think we are all proud of and which enjoys bipartisan support today—and we recommit ourselves to pursuing the goal of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS related deaths.