Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am so pleased to speak to the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025. At the outset, I would like to thank my incredible team for their support and guidance as we've considered this bill in detail.

The Greens have long called on successive governments to establish a centre for disease control, one that is independent, well-funded and appropriately resourced to meet the needs of our Australian community. Like so many nations around the world, we have come to confront a moment in time where a structure such as this is deeply needed. In establishing a centre for disease control, we will join countries including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The Australian public health community have been advocating for one here at home for many, many years. Many in that community will be proud and perhaps a little relieved that we are finally here today with a bill before the Senate to establish Australia's own Centre for Disease Control from 1 January 2026.

The Australian CDC, led by a director-general and an advisory council, will fill a longstanding gap in our public health infrastructure. It will provide advice to government and to the public on a wide range of health matters and serve as a national coordinator for public health data—a critical role that has been missing for far too long. It is my hope that, in the establishment of a CDC, we will see the delivery of greater visibility, understanding and research across key areas of public health—all the better to support the health and wellbeing of our communities.

Over the past five years, our health systems have been pushed to their limits. Reviews, reports and lived experience have all made it crystal clear: Australia must strengthen its public health infrastructure. That includes improving pandemic preparedness, enhancing data sharing between the Commonwealth and the states and the territories, and building a nationally coordinated response to growing health impacts, particularly those of climate change.

Let me touch on the completed Senate inquiry. I am pleased that this bill passed through the investigation that it was subjected to at the inquiry. It allowed us to hear from a broader community and to road-test with experts what they actually made of the legislation as it had been crafted. Reviewing the submissions, it became clear that many in the public health community are enthusiastic about the establishment of the CDC. The majority of submissions to the inquiry were supportive of the bill, and many offered constructive recommendations as to how it might be strengthened in terms of its design and its implementation. One of the key areas that many in the community have identified as missing from this legislation is the glaring absence of any focus on non-communicable and chronic disease. We know that chronic disease is one of the biggest public health challenges facing Australia today. Chronic disease contributes to nine out of every 10 deaths which occur. Every single year, these conditions account for 6.4 million hospitalisations. One in every two Australians lives with at least one chronic disease. And, if someone has one, it is highly likely that they will have another. Living with chronic disease often means spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars every single year on health care and medication. It can mean cancelling plans because you are too unwell to get out of bed. It can mean being unable to work because your symptoms are unpredictable and your condition simply does not fit into a nine-to-five world.

Right now, people living with chronic illness are falling through the cracks of a fragmented system. Allied health appointments are unaffordable, preventative care is underfunded and access to treatment is inconsistent. All of this stems from a lack of clear policy direction on chronic disease. That's why it is so concerning that the bill fails to include chronic disease within its remit. The message from the community was crystal clear. Submissions to the inquiry into this bill overwhelmingly called for chronic disease to be a key focus of the CDC from the very beginning. The Grattan Institute put it plainly in their submission:

… putting off the decision about whether the CDC will ultimately play a leading role in combatting chronic disease is a mistake. It contradicts evidence and international norms, and will cause uncertainty and delay while the burden of chronic disease continues to rise.

The Australian Greens acknowledge that the minister has indicated a future review could consider expanding the CDC's scope to include chronic disease. We welcome that intention, but people living with chronic disease and illness cannot afford to wait for another review, another report or another delay. We urge the government to listen to the evidence, the experts and, most importantly, the people living with chronic conditions every single day. Bring chronic disease into the CDC's mandate as soon as possible, not later, because people with chronic disease have waited long enough. I move the amendment on sheet 3475 in my name calling on the government to include non-communicable and chronic disease within the purview of the Australian Centre for Disease Control:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) non-communicable and chronic disease is among Australia's biggest public health challenges, contributing to nine in ten deaths and 6.4 million hospitalisations each year, and

(ii) public health experts have repeatedly called for the inclusion of non-communicable and chronic disease within the scope of the Australian Centre for Disease Control; and

(b) affirms that expanding the Australian Centre for Disease Control's remit to include non-communicable and chronic disease will improve national action on disease prevention and management; and

(c) calls on the Government to include non-communicable and chronic disease within the scope of the Australian Centre for Disease Control as soon as practicable".

I am pleased to say that the bill before us today has a strong focus on First Nations health. It is encouraging to see the requirement that at least one member of the advisory council must be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, ensuring that lived experience informs the advice provided to the director-general. It is vital that the Centre for Disease Control and the advice it provides reflects the diversity and lived experience of the Australian community. However, upon reviewing this legislation, I was concerned to see that disability was not mentioned at all. The National Centre for Excellence in Intellectual Disability Health highlighted this gap in their submission. They drew attention to the findings of the Commonwealth government's COVID-19 response inquiry, which documented the experience of disabled people during the pandemic, saying it 'stressed the importance of mechanisms to ensure government health responses are informed by people with lived experience and expertise in disability.'

For many in our community, the last pandemic was, and in many ways still is, a time of great fear. We lost too many friends and loved ones. Many people continue to live with the consequences of COVID-19—those with long COVID and those who still isolate in their homes for safety. Looking back, the many lives of disabled people were left at the mercy of government decision-making. We hoped they wouldn't forget us or, worse, leave us to die. At that time there was no guarantee that a disabled person would have a seat at the table where decisions about our very lives were being made. As advice was issued, we had no certainty that our perspective had been heard, and that is a fear that we still hold today.

That is why I am proud to be putting forward an amendment to this bill to enshrine in law that a disabled person must hold a seat on the advisory council. Our Greens amendment makes clear that the advisory council should include at least one member who is a disabled person with expertise in the health needs of disabled people. It may be just one seat at the table, but it is a seat at the table. It is my hope that, if this amendment is supported, future health emergencies will not again leave disabled people out of sight or out of mind.

If I move now to the climate crisis, the Australian Greens know—even if some in this chamber refuse to see it—that climate change is one of the biggest threats to public health in this country. We are already seeing the health impacts of a warming planet. More frequent and intense natural disasters are hitting our shores. Heatwaves are sweeping across our country, becoming longer, hotter and deadlier. A recent Monash University report showed that between 2016 and 2019 heatwaves caused more than 1,000 deaths in Australia.

We are on track—with the Labor government still approving huge-emitting projects like Woodside's North West Shelf Project—to continue to make these crises worse. These are real-time health impacts, driven by the climate crisis, exacerbated by the decision of this government to approve and approve new coal and gas projects. The government's own climate risk assessment warned of incredibly dire outcomes if swift action to address climate change is not taken. In some parts of Australia we could see an increase of more than 400 per cent in heatwave related deaths. This is not a future problem; it is happening now. It's asthma attacks triggered by bushfire smoke. It's heat stress on outdoor workers. It's the mental health toll on communities hit again and again by floods, by fire and by drought. This is the reality lived by so many in our community right at this very moment. This is why it is so important that the health impacts of climate change are front and centre in the work of the Centre for Disease Control. To ensure that this happens, the Greens are calling for the health impacts of climate change to be explicitly included in the CDC's annual reporting.

On the matter of the role of the director-general, there has been much discussion through the course of this debate, both in the House and in the Senate, on the role of the director-general and the responsibilities of the role of the chair of the advisory council. I'd like to acknowledge the range of organisations who have called for there to be a chair of the advisory council who is not the director-general. These organisations include Deakin University's Faculty of Health, the Public Health Association of Australia, the Cancer Council of Australia, the Kirby Institute, the Burnet Institute and Indigenous Allied Health Australia, among others.

It has been disappointing that these calls have not been heard by this government. Essentially, in the spirit of establishing a CDC, we are willing to give the structure outlined in the legislation a go. But we are very clear that the structure of the advisory council, including the role of the chair, should be in the scope of further reviews. The government has also stated that the CDC should be, 'transparent, trusted and independent'. For the CDC to earn the trust of the public, it must take every measure to ensure that data privacy and security is at the top of the agenda. It must ensure the safety and protection of the information that is trusted to it.

The Australian Greens will be supporting this bill. It is a change whose time has come. I commend it and our amendments to the Senate.