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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Wednesday, 31 March 2004) . . Page.. 1405 ..

MS DUNDAS (11.49): I move the following amendment:

Omit paragraph (4).

Today we are debating a very interesting and important issue. I note however that the report from the National Health and Medical Research Council came down last year. If this was considered an urgent debate, there have been ample opportunities to have this discussion in the Assembly.

Free pneumococcal immunisation is provided to those children who are most at risk of contracting the disease. On my information, that figure is around 19,000. That includes all children living in Central Australia, all children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent and those with a medical condition that places them at increased risk.

There is no doubt that pneumococcal is a dangerous disease and one that is preventable. I accept Ms MacDonald’s point that pneumococcal not only causes more deaths than meningococcal but also causes more hospital visits. As a society we tend to throw our weight behind preventing and treating diseases and illnesses and often leave other afflictions behind, no matter how serious they are. Pneumococcal is one of those diseases that is neglected, in a publicity sense, because it is most prevalent in Central Australia, away from the eyes of metropolitan media. In an ideal world, all preventable diseases would be prevented rather than just those that grab the headlines.

Why should children’s lives be put at risk while governments squabble over who is going to pay for a vaccination? It is an interesting point of this debate: we are again calling on the federal government to pick up the slack on something that we see as incredibly important.

We have not discussed the ongoing side effects of vaccinations—that has not really been explored as it should be—and we are expressing our concern that the federal government is not following the National Health and Medical Research Council’s recommendations. We need to look at what the ACT government can and should be doing in relation to the state of our health care system.

I know it is the federal government’s responsibility to deal with these issues. We cannot set up the situation where we say, “We’ll do it because we have to” and let the federal government off lightly. But because of the Medicare Plus deal that the federal government has done with the independent systems our health system is approaching decline. The ACT has been particularly badly hit by the Medicare Plus deal. The health of our citizens in the ACT is simply so important that we cannot continually pass the blame on to the federal government. We should be looking at the promotion of childhood immunisation. We should be looking at what we as an Assembly will prioritise through the budgets for the health care of the ACT.

I have moved this amendment, which deletes clause 4 of the motion, because I do not think we can note the health and financial benefits gained by providing pneumococcal disease vaccine free to all Australia. The work has not been done—the evidence has not been provided—that the cost benefit of a nation-wide vaccination will be the best for the community.

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