Page 908 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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make some comments on the Minister for Health’s amendment. I will start on this important issue by reflecting on the fact that the good work of immunisation was in many ways done many decades ago. I think there is a sense in the community amongst some that we can be complacent because people no longer see the results of not being immunised against tetanus and polio.
Mr Gentleman, Mr Doszpot and I are probably old enough to remember that there were people in our classes who disappeared from school for long periods of time. I sat next to a girl in first grade who suddenly became ill and missed an entire year of her schooling because she contracted tetanus. It was very touch and go for quite some time, and she bears the scars to this day of the long-term tracheotomy she had to allow her to feed and breathe over the extended period of her very painful hospitalisation.
I also have friends and colleagues who have suffered from polio, and I understand the long-term debilitating effects that poliomyelitis caused for those people who were lucky enough to survive the condition. When you see some of the commentary about vaccination in this day and age from some less informed people, I think we have become complacent because we do not see before us, as we did in previous generations, the sheer volume of diseases.
According to the World Health Organisation, polio was eliminated from the western Pacific, including Australia, in the year 2000. The last reported case of poliomyelitis acquired in the wild in Australia was in 1972. This is important because there are whole generations of children who have grown up being inoculated against poliomyelitis and their parents have never seen it and they sometimes, I suspect, wonder why they bother. This is a very important aspect of our education program, and I applaud the minister for her emphasis on the importance of the constant education we need to ensure that these once life-threatening and highly contagious diseases have become almost a thing of the past.
Measles had a high level of occurrence. When I was a child and there was no immunisation against measles it was common practice for parents in family groups that if a child had measles you put all the kids together in the hope that the other kids would get the measles and then that would be out of the way. Parents did not understand the long-term health implications of what appeared to be a very mild disease. But we know that in a small number of cases the implications of measles are extraordinarily debilitating and often fatal.
This is why the commonwealth and the states have endorsed the no jab no pay policy which began in January 2016. The policy means that parents miss out on childcare benefits, rebates and the family tax benefit part A if their child is not fully immunised or not on a recognised catch-up schedule. There are, of course, exemptions available, but objection to vaccination is not one of them.
Recently the Prime Minister wrote to the states and territories, as the minister has said, asking to extend the no jab no pay policy to a no jab no play policy, which requires much more collaboration from the states and territories. I note that Queensland and Victoria already have such legislation in place. Again, exemptions are available, but
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