Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier today the Senate passed a resolution calling on the government to formally respond to the report of the Senate Select Committee into Funding for Research into Cancers with Low Survival Rates. Last month I wrote to the Minister for Health, Mr Hunt, to remind him that the government's response is well overdue and to ask when it will be forthcoming. The government is required to respond to committee reports within three months. However, this report was tabled almost a year ago, and we're still waiting for the government's response. It's simply not good enough. Each month that goes by without a response to the report sees hundreds of Australians die from cancers with low survival rates. It's a slap in the face to the researchers, the medical practitioners and the advocacy groups who have shared their insight, knowledge and experience. It's a slap in the face to the members of the committee—including government, opposition and crossbench senators—and to the secretariat, who all listened astutely to the tragic stories, processed large volumes of highly technical information and worked incredibly hard to come up with an excellent and unanimous report.

Most disturbingly, though, it's a slap in the face to the many cancer patients and their families, who bravely came and gave evidence. They told their very personal stories to the committee. Many of these witnesses fought back tears—in fact, some shed tears at the public hearings, and, I have to say, so did members of the committee and those watching on. They knew that giving their testimony would be difficult and painful, but they did so in the hope that cancers with low survival rates would finally be given the attention they deserve. Patients of stomach, brain, oesophageal, lung, pancreatic liver and gallbladder cancer, to name just a few, deserve some hope that the incredible advances we've seen in the survival rates of other forms of cancer, such as breast cancer or leukaemia, can be replicated in cancers with low survival rates.

I do acknowledge that the government have put up some important initiatives, but I also want to point out that the only action the government appear to have taken as a direct response to the inquiry is establishing the Low Survival Cancers and Diseases Grant Opportunity. If the government has responded in other ways to the report's 25 recommendations then the onus is on them to explain what they've done and how it addresses the recommendations, because there are many, many recommendations that the government has not yet addressed. Of particular importance was the recommendation that low-survival-rate cancers be identified as one of the National Health and Medical Research Council's national health priorities. To date, it hasn't.

The committee also recommended an Australia-wide strategy to increase the survival rate for these cancers to 50 per cent by 2027. The government has not announced such a strategy or made any steps towards developing it. I've still yet to see any action from the government on improving access to clinical trials, including further streamlining ethics and government approval processes, making information on clinical trials more user friendly, facilitating innovative and flexible clinical trial design, and allowing trial participants to access patient travel subsidy schemes. All these things would make a huge difference to the lives of these people suffering low-survival-rate cancers. Granted, some of these actions require work by state and territory governments, but the Australian government needs to lead that process.

In that inquiry, we received over 300 submissions and we had 117 witnesses appear at the public hearings. For every patient with a low-survival cancer or every family member of a patient who participated in the inquiry, there are hundreds, if not thousands, more who could potentially benefit from the outcomes of this inquiry. They want not only to hear that these recommendations are being taken seriously by the government but to know that they've been acted upon. Patients of cancers with low survival rates are looking for hope. By failing to respond to this report, this government is denying them the hope that they so desperately seek and deserve. As I said, the government should have responded in three months. It's been another eight months. That makes 11 months—nearly a year. The government needs to do— (Time expired)