Page 203 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2019
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high risk and that there simply were not enough donated organs in this country to risk giving Matt a shot. Matt was never in the right window of being just that right level of unhealthy, a window that is unfortunately necessarily imposed because organ donation rates are low. Despite this refusal, Matt remained a passionate supporter of organ donation together with his wife, Mallie. In fact, he completed the Gift of Life walk with Mallie just weeks before he died.
These stories are not easy; it is not easy for these loved ones to relive the difficult circumstances and death of their loved one, but these stories are so important. I thank and commend Mallie for how she is continuing to honour Matt and, by doing so, raising awareness of the impact organ donation can have or, in her and Matt’s case, could have had. She is a real credit to the cause.
The thing is, Madam Speaker, our organ donation rates in the ACT are decent; we do all right in terms of averages. But the community support for organ donation is consistently much higher than the consent rates from families. Why is that? It seems there might be quite a lot of reasons and it is something I look forward to talking about and working on in coming months, including with people like Mallie Taylor.
As a start at least, families having an understanding of the wishes of their loved ones is important in improving consent rates so they much better match the community sentiment. Madam Speaker, through you I ask the Canberra community to use today as that prompt, that nudge, to take a moment to share their wishes with their loved ones and to ask their loved ones what they would want too.
Indigenous rights
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (5.39): This week we remember 15 February 2008 when the Prime Minister made a heartfelt apology to Australia’s first nations people. It was a day of sadness but also a day of joy, a day filled with tears and jubilation. Most of all it was a day that generated hope; hope that at last there was a will to set right the wrongs that had been inflicted upon Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders since the British colonisers arrived.
Since the commencement of the closing the gap strategy also announced 11 years ago, little has changed. Sadly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still over-represented in out of home care and the juvenile and criminal justice systems. They have lower life expectancy than non-Indigenous Australians and still have high child mortality rates, gaps in reading, literacy and numeracy, gaps in employment and gaps in school attendance.
We know that six out of seven targets were not on track at the 10-year mark of the strategy. Something has to change if statistical gaps are to be closed. Structural inequalities must be tackled through constitutional reform to create a representative Indigenous voice to parliament.
I was deeply saddened when the Uluru Statement from the Heart, developed in 2017, was outright rejected by the then Prime Minister. This quite reasonable and frankly necessary step of truth-telling and call for acknowledgement of fair, honest
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