Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government has backed this reform with serious investment—$251.7 million over four years to established the CDC and $73.3 million in ongoing annual funding from 2028-29. That is a long-term commitment to building national capability. At the national level this reform would transform the way Australia manages public health threats. The CDC would become the central hub for public health expertise, supporting both the Australian government and state and territory agencies to respond consistently and effectively when emergencies arise. It would strengthen pandemic preparedness by ensuring our national medical stockpile, testing capacity and response plans are regularly reviewed and updated. It would coordinate surveillance for infectious diseases, track emerging risks and build rapid response capacity. It would provide an authoritative public voice during health emergencies, cutting through misinformation with clear evidence based information.

The COVID-19 inquiry found that confusion and mistrust flourished when communication was inconsistent. The CDC would help fix that. This bill also reinforces Australia's global standing. The CDC would work closely with international bodies like the World Health Organization to share expertise and support global health security. As we saw during COVID, disease threats do not stop at national borders. A strong Australian CDC would help protect not only our country but our region.

If I turn to Tasmania, this bill is particularly important for my home state. Tasmania's geography brings both strengths and vulnerabilities. Our isolation can help slow the spread of disease, but it also makes it harder to access supplies, staff and support when emergencies strike. During COVID-19 Tasmania faced major challenges. It took a toll on our health workforce and our communities. A national CDC would ensure that Tasmania is never left behind in national planning and response. It would give our public health experts direct access to national data, resources and expertise. It would also help coordinate responses to future risks from respiratory illnesses in aged care to zoonotic diseases that could affect our farming and agriculture industries.

Tasmania's local health authorities already do outstanding work. The new CDC would not replace them. It would strengthen them. The CDC's data-sharing systems would make it easier for Tasmanian public health teams to identify outbreaks early and target support where it is needed. Because the CDC would embed a one-health approach, it would also support research into how climate and environmental factors affect health, something that matters deeply to Tasmania. As the climate changes, we are seeing shifts in disease patterns. Mosquito borne illnesses, like Japanese encephalitis, are moving further south. The CDC will help track and prepare for these changes, so communities like ours can stay safe.

This reform will also have real benefits for Tasmania's economy and community resilience. Health emergencies are not just health issues; they affect business, schools, tourism and local government services. By improving national coordination, the CDC will help keep communities open and economies stable when future crises occur. That's good for work, it's good for families, and it's good for small businesses that depend on certainty. This legislation is a clear expression of Labor values. It's about fairness, safety and collective responsibility. It recognises that public health is a public good—something we all depend on and must build together.

It also reflects Labor's belief in strong public institutions. Under the former government, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency was abolished in 2014. That decision weakened our national capacity to respond to public health challenges. This bill puts prevention back at the heart of our health system. It aligns with other major Albanese government initiatives, from strengthening Medicare and mental health to improving pandemic preparedness and protecting aged care residents. It complements the work of the National Health and Climate Strategy, which recognises that climate change is not only an environmental challenge but a health one. It supports the goals of the Measuring What Matters framework, which commits us to tracking wellbeing and resilience, not just economic growth. And it contributes to our broader national resilience agenda, ensuring Australia is better equipped to withstand shocks, from natural disasters to biosecurity threats. Labor's approach to government is about learning from the past and building stronger systems for the future.

The establishment of the CDC also has positive gender and equity impacts. A gender impact assessment found that the CDC will help address the disproportionate health effects of communicable diseases on women, First Nations people, people with disability, culturally diverse communities and those facing economic disadvantage. This is not just about managing pandemics; it's about making sure that, when health risks arise, our response protects everyone, especially those most at risk. Labor believes that every Australian deserves equal access to safety, information and care.

The COVID-19 inquiry also highlighted the importance of trust. During a crisis, people need to know that the information they are receiving is accurate and transparent. This bill enshrines transparency as a guiding principle of the CDC's work. The Director-General must publish advice that includes recommendations and make that advice accessible to the public. This is how we rebuild and maintain trust in public health: by letting the evidence speak for itself. It's also why the bill establishes strong oversight for an advisory council, which must include at least one Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander expert in health. The council will ensure that diverse voices, including community and cultural expertise, inform the CDC's priorities and actions.

The Albanese government has carefully designed this reform to be both effective and sustainable. Funding of $251.7 million over four years has been allocated, and ongoing funding from 2028-29 will ensure stability and capability into the future. The CDC will be governed under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act, ensuring clear lines of accountability and prudent use of public resources. It will also be subject to regular reviews—the first after two years of operation and then every five years—to ensure it remains contemporary and effective. That means that this agency will evolve as our understanding of health threats evolves.

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 is one of the most significant health reforms in a generation. It fulfils Labor's commitment to create an independent, transparent, national body to protect the health of all Australians. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in opposition to this globalist takeover of Australian health, represented by the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. These are bills which are going to further entrench the errors of the COVID-19 era into permanent federal bureaucracy in this country. The COVID period was a time of arbitrary bureaucratic edicts and contradictory health advice, something that more and more people have come to admit as the social pressure applied to them during that period has lessened. State government public health messaging, which inspired at the time by the US's own CDC and the World Health Organization, manipulated the Australian population, and the tactics used had very much the opposite of science and medicine in mind. They were about fear and propaganda. The COVID period was an absurd period in the nation's history in which bullying temporarily prevailed over rational discussion and inquiry, though, thankfully, many Australians saw through it. Arbitrary edicts such as mask-wearing and 1.5-metre social distancing were weaponised to close playgrounds, tape off park benches, separate families at funerals and prevent people from visiting dying loved ones in hospitals. Much of the suffering during that period was the result of government overreach and intervention that was enacted 'for your safety'.

Over in the US, the American CDC became a symbol of politicised science, suppressed dissent and connections to pharmaceutical giants that were apparently above government scrutiny. The CDC's general advice was relied on by left-wing politicians and socialists and generally wielded as a cudgel even though dissidents were simply asking basic questions that the health authorities had no reasonable answers to. Those questions included things like: 'Why do I have to wear a mask on the way to the restaurant but not when I'm sitting at the table? Why do I have to get a vaccine with no long-term safety data if it doesn't prevent infection or the spread of the disease? Why is the Nobel Prize-winning, for-humans drug ivermectin being suppressed when it is safe?'

Furthermore, the American CDC has often served as yet another enforcement arm of the ideological state, another bureaucratic element of clown world, as it could be called. It publishes articles about combating racism through public health policies and seems preoccupied with promoting a DEI version of public health in which the patriarchy and colonialism are portrayed as public health threats. One can read articles published by the CDC to find out the Impact of racist microaggressions and LGBTQ-related minority stressors: effects on psychological distress among LGBTQ+ young people of color, which, of course, is clearly designed to promote a cultural and political narrative and has nothing to do with health. This is not actual health research.

During COVID, the US's CDC advice simply reiterated health slogans and mantras, which made it clear that to ask questions meant you should essentially be considered a threat to others. We don't have to go over all the details there; we've lived them so often. But I think it would be fair to say that, following the COVID period, we should be reconsidering our relationship with and our reliance on such institutions. The notion that the lesson we've learnt from the pandemic period is that we need greater centralised authority with regard to public health measures is a laughable concept, yet that's apparently what we learnt. That notion here arrives in light of the COVID-19 response inquiry report, which was published late last year.

That review was always going to present a one-sided perspective of the events, although it paid carefully crafted lip service to the criticism of state governments in that period, such as acknowledging the strict border closures and lockdowns that might have been a touch overdone. The report was still designed to reinforce and justify the bureaucratic narrative, ultimately chalking up public outrage and the obvious errors of health departments to misinformation and a lack of data-sharing capabilities. 'If only the federal government had greater control,' they said, and hence the predictable recommendation was to create an Australian CDC. The inquiry report ignored the excess deaths phenomenon that's undoubtedly connected to the COVID-19 vaccines. It dismissed the scepticism of a vaccine that was hurriedly developed as being a result of mis- and disinformation and excused the draconian, heavy-handed mask mandates, lockdowns, border closures and so on as the result of being in an unprecedented situation. It just goes on and on. Aside from its purpose of justifying the narrative for the CDC, it's not worth reading.

At the risk of repeating what I've said many times before, there was nothing unprecedented or unpredictable about what happened during this period. There are no excuses for the manipulative fear-inducing tactics that people, whether they were part of the government or not, used to intimidate others into compliance. It was obvious from the outset that COVID was not what we were being led to believe it was. Those who were intelligent enough to perceive that and brave enough to call it out were of course vilified by all of those in power. When the virus first arrived, there were people who knew that it actually wasn't very dangerous, and the case fatality rates were the same as the regular seasonal flu. If you weren't paying attention to the news, there really wasn't much reason to be concerned. It was only the media hysteria and stern attitudes of government officials that made everyone think differently. Few people under the age of 70 really had anything to worry about when it came to COVID. I have discussed elsewhere those staggering statistics which make the hysteria look completely absurd in hindsight.

All of this is reason enough for opposing this bill. The lesson of COVID is not that we need tighter government control and more opportunity to combat misinformation. The lesson is more like we need to understand that, during the COVID period, health officials wielded too much power and were able to appeal to their own authority rather than real evidence. A good example of this arose when I asked SA health via a freedom-of-information request to provide the actual research undertaken to justify their public health measures, and all I got back was a series of meeting notes about that big—essentially nothing to see.

We've got to understand that practitioners like doctors and nurses who raised questions about the safety of vaccines during that period or said anything which might be interpreted as undermining the government's official stance on the products, whether acting in their professional capacity or speaking privately, were told they would be suspended from their work. 'Trust the science,' amounted to nothing more than, 'Obey.' Yet the academic class congratulated themselves for their perception of their own heroism. I personally met many health professionals who have been excluded from the system they once worked for, for doing what they understood to be their job, which is treating individual patients with approaches which suited them as individuals. That, apparently, posed a threat to public health.

We've got to understand that many regular citizens who questioned the mandates, the lockdowns, the strict border closures and so on were routinely dehumanised and labelled as dangerous and crazy by the media establishment. Many of them even lost their jobs for refusing to receive the treatment—a treatment that had zero long-term safety data and a range of reported adverse effects. Others were pressured into receiving it when they didn't want or need it because of financial concerns. As long as there is any reason to think the Australian CDC is going to promote or endorse such measures, I will not support this bill. There is no reason to think it won't. Simply put, the lesson of COVID is that just because the government says something does not make it true.

To briefly address the bill itself, I will begin by noting that there is no real or concrete rationale for it. It's all pretty broad, generic rhetoric suggesting the need for greater data-sharing capabilities, the need for pandemic preparedness and the need for a public health authority to give clear messaging to Australians. It's not really clear to anyone why the new organisation needs to be developed for things that already seem to fall within the purview of the department of health, or why these things can't happen in the current system.

There is no real cost-benefit analysis provided; however, as usual, the creation of this new organisation is creating a new role—in this case, the CDC director-general, which sounds very important, but this is another person who will be an unelected anointed bureaucrat wielding a good deal of sweeping powers. The director-general will hold powers to direct information to be provided to them, issue emergency data declarations and plan with foreign governments and international organisations. The director-general may request or direct individuals, companies or state entities to provide specific information, with civil penalties for refusal; trigger broad information-sharing across governments and private entities during a severe and immediate or unforeseen threat; and form arrangements with foreign governments and international arrangements on health matters. Suffice to say this is fairly broad and somewhat ambiguous suite of powers for the new role at a time when trust in this sector is at an all-time low.

It's also worth noting that the new Australian CDC is somehow connected to the health effects of climate change, which is predictably defined in the bill as a public health matter. As a technical point, it's worth noting that environmental health is already separately accounted for in the bill, so it seems reductive to talk separately about climate change. It appears to be more of a political gesture than anything else, and it signals that the ideological slant of the CDC will likely have, in the eyes of many Australians, already undermined its credibility.

Very alarmingly, the CDC has embedded One Health as a core guiding principle—that's right—promoting a practical collaboration between doctors, ecologists and wildlife biologists, to name but a few. For anyone listening, have a look at it. Of course, it's supported by the World Health Organization, the UN and many other nations across the world. Don't just take it from me. The new CDC's own website states:

One Health takes an integrated, unifying approach to tackling health challenges that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.

Wow! One has to wonder whether the powers of the Director-General will be used in some politicised. nonsensical effort to control Australians through climate change measures. Even if one grants the necessity of creating this CDC, which seems dubious to begin with, one can't support the bill if concerned about the abuse of the climate change narrative. Will climate change be treated as a severe and immediate threat? Well, guess what? Prepare for your first climate lockdown.

It's most notable that the explanatory memorandum to the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025, which has been co-introduced, states:

Schedule 3 under the Freedom of Information Act … will also be amended to ensure information protected by the secrecy provision in the CDC Bill (personal and commercial in confidence information) would be exempt from disclosure under subsection 38(1) of the FOI Act. This would exempt protected information from publication under the Director-General's duty to publish public health advice. It also ensures protected information is exempt from release under freedom of information requests under the FOI Act.

Simply put, the bill's quietly amending the Freedom of Information Act to protect the CDC from scrutiny. Any information the Director-General deems protected—which might include commercial information or might relate to anything—could be legally exempt from FOI release, which removes the possibility of information disclosure that would hold the CDC to account in future events. Of course, they would just be able to say, 'Trust the science,' to not worry about any FOI inconveniences—it's obvious that this would be inconvenient for the CDC—and to save the effort of having to empirically justify their own decisions.

In conclusion, the establishment of an Australian CDC represents the bricking in of all the mistakes and methodology of the so-called experts throughout the COVID period. The case for its necessity hasn't been adequately made, and the wrongs of the 'expertocracy' during COVID haven't been adequately accounted for; we haven't had a royal commission. We should be culling the bureaucracy at this point, not creating more. For that reason, and for many others, I will be opposing this bill.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the establishment of an Australian CDC. I've got to say, Senator Antic, it was pretty hard for me to listen to what you just said. That tirade was next level, particularly for someone who was on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was a healthcare professional on that front line with my colleagues, wrapped in PPE. I put it to you that you get to stand here, and I get to stand here, thanks to the decisions that were made by healthcare professionals, public health specialists and government. And I also say to all those Victorians: yes, it was really hard; I completely agree it was hard. But the decisions that were made by the then Victorian government meant that our hospitals in Victoria did not collapse. We remained functional and we were able to still see patients, some of whom died.

The fact that next week I will be celebrating my father's 85th birthday means that we did something right as a country. Yes, there were a lot of things that went wrong and that we want to learn from. And this is why we are, as a Labor government, fulfilling a promise that we took to two elections: to establish a national centre for disease control. We will now be aligned with other OECD countries in the world who actually have a centre like this so that we do not have to go through some of that confusing, contradictory advice that we had during the pandemic.

I won't stand here, as a Victorian, and watch people like Senator Antic—and others, no doubt, during the course of today—tear down the decisions that were made. It was tough; it was really tough. I saw enough people die on the front line, often people who did not get vaccinated. They either ended up gasping for air—and we were unable to save them—or they ended up with chronic health conditions thereafter.

So we are establishing this long-awaited CDC. It is a capability born in the aftermath of a one-in-100-years event, which was the COVID-19 pandemic. It will stand as an enduring legacy of this Labor government, up there with Medicare, up there with the National Reconstruction Fund and up there with the National Anti-Corruption Commission. We're doing it because it was evident from those years that Australia was woefully underprepared for what came to our doorstep—woefully underprepared.

Under the former government, there had not been a national pandemic drill for 12 years. It's not as if there hadn't been pandemics. We have had pandemics. It started off with Spanish flu, and in this century we've had SARS-1; we've had swine flu; we've had MERS, Middle Eastern respiratory disease; and we've now, of course, had the COVID-19 pandemic. But, for whatever reason, the previous government never decided we needed to have a pandemic drill.

We had no playbook. I know for a fact that other countries, particularly those that were hit hard by the first wave of SARS, SARS-1, like Singapore, China and Hong Kong, did have playbooks. It was literally a book on a shelf that they pulled off the shelf and opened to page 1. That's how they responded when they were hit with COVID-19. This is what our Commonwealth Centre for Disease Control will deliver for Australians—a playbook that we can literally take off the shelf and open to page 1 when we are hit, inevitably, with the next pandemic.

We also note that it was tough during that pandemic. I know this well, probably most acutely as a Victorian. We went through around six lockdowns, amounting to 260 days. My children were stuck at home with school online for nearly two years, on and off. My daughter went through her VCE soon after. I wasn't in lockdown. I went to work every day. I was wrapped in PPE with my co-workers on that front line, and it was really hard. We sweltered under that plastic to the point where one day I nearly had to catch my registrar. That's what it was like. But I'm also aware that it was a real struggle for people in the community to go through that period. Confidence was shaken, no doubt. Trust was eroded. Businesses struggled. This was no more evident than on the front line in aged care, when we actually had to send the Army in to rescue aged care, such was the state of the aged-care system. It was utterly broken.

So we do believe, given what we have gone through, that we need to establish an Australian centre for disease control. This CDC will have the capability to lead consistent advice, to be a source of authority and of ground truth, to be responsive and to ensure that we are prepared—that we have resilience back into our system. It is essential that we do that. Its focus initially will be on communicable diseases, which are, of course, infectious diseases—my wheelhouse. And I can tell you all now: the bugs are smarter than us. They always are. They will always be one step ahead of us because they mutate. They mutate fast. Every single one of those pandemics that I listed emerged from the animal kingdom. So, when we talk about one health being enshrined in an Australian CDC, we're referring to the fact that most of these pandemics that have affected humans have emerged from animals, so there's no point corralling human health from animal health. The two are intertwined, and that is what this legislation recognises.

I do support us rolling this out in a staged fashion, initially addressing infectious diseases, because I think that, yes, while there is an intention to later on address chronic diseases—non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and obesity—we want to ensure that we set up this institution for success. Trying to do too much too soon will only overload the system and undermine its confidence to actually carry out this kind of work. We want to set it up for success, and I think that a staged approach is important. I thank the Greens political party and the contributions from Senator Steele-John in recognising that we need to have a disability voice in the advisory committee. I think that is incredibly important, because the disability community were the hardest hit during the pandemic. They are a highly vulnerable group of people, and they died or suffered the most acute effects of lockdown, being completely segregated from the wider community.

In terms of recognising the need for the CDC to look at the impacts of climate change—

Honourable Senator:

An honourable senator interjecting—

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I absolutely agree with you; it should do that. Climate change is the threat multiplier. It puts pressure on every single system and sector of society. It's not just about heatwaves; it's not just about heat stress. There's so much more going on when it comes to climate change. It will certainly dovetail and support the work that our government has done in creating a national health and climate strategy. It will be complementary to that.

I want to issue a note of caution here, though. During the pandemic I became an activist. I was a science based activist. I spoke up for the health and welfare of healthcare workers, because we were not being looked after during that pandemic. It was really difficult. It was existential for us. It was existential for patients and people in the community, but it was absolutely existential for the front line.

I came away from that with learnings that I think the CDC needs to take into account. Firstly, we need to protect the workforce. The healthcare workforce is mission critical to the functioning of this nation. Protect the workforce; ring fence the workforce. It is the asset. It's not the experts, necessarily; it's the workforce. The workforce is everything. Protect the asset.

We should not be in a situation where PPE is being rationed in hospitals, aged-care facilities or clinics. We should not be in a situation where surgeons are jury-rigging their masks and literally sticking micropore tape on the edges of their mask because they have not been given the right PPE. We should not be in a situation where paramedics are having their masks and goggles fog up while they are resuscitating patients during a pandemic. That is exactly what happened. We should not be in a situation where healthcare workers are purchasing their own PPE, at considerable cost, because it's simply not provided by their place of work. We should not be in a situation where any healthcare worker is gaslit or censured in a system that privileges optics over work health and safety. Healthcare workers don't ask for much, but they want to be kept safe at work, especially when they are faced with a life-threatening, infectious disease.

I would say to an incoming CDC leadership: actually take some time to think about enacting the precautionary principle. If you're not sure, go to the highest level and then work backwards as the science evolves. Failure to do so puts lives at risk. If you are going to put frontline healthcare workers' lives at risk, what you are wishing for is collapse of the health system, burnout amongst staff and departures of staff from the health system, which just puts additional stress on other staff. You end up enacting a downward spiral, which is exactly what we saw and which was a mess that we cleaned up when we came to government.

Secondly, we need to ensure that we have a diversity of voices around the table, such as the voices of disability. We should make sure we have adequate representation around that advisory committee. We must have voices from the front line—from the nurses, the doctors, the paramedics and the allied health professionals. We must ensure that these voices are heard. If not, we end up with groupthink. We end up with leaders who are making decisions on behalf of people who are actually in the hot zone, and they may not always get it right. So listen to that wisdom from the edge. It is really, really important. It is a protective factor against making bad decisions.

Thirdly, we need to be open facing. A future CDC needs to be open facing to the public and listen to the workforce and to the science. It's important that a CDC responds to evolving science. In particular, I cite clean air. We spent far too long, right round this country, wiping down surfaces, which would have been fine if we had had a pandemic of gastro, but we didn't. We had a pandemic of a respiratory virus that was travelling through the air, and it was too late before that was adequately (1) recognised and (2) addressed.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator; you will be in continuation. It being 1.30, we will now move to two-minute statements.