Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025, Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025
Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (18:44): I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. These bills, together, establish a new national body, the Australian Centre for Disease Control, as a statutory, non-corporate Commonwealth entity. The proposed CDC would be led by the director-general, appointed by and reporting directly to the Minister for Health and Ageing and accountable to the federal parliament.
The bills amend a wide range of existing legislation, including the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and the Biosecurity Act 2015, and make transitional provisions to transfer significant functions and powers between the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the Chief Medical Officer and the new entity. While strengthening Australia's public health preparedness is an unquestionable priority, the mechanism proposed in these bills and in the considerable powers being transferred warrant far closer examination than has yet been received.
Despite the significance of this legislation, the government and its Greens allies on the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee refused to hold a single public hearing for the inquiry into the bill. Despite receiving over 40 submissions—many proposing substantive amendments—the committee denied experts and the public any opportunity to be heard. This is unacceptable and another example of the disturbing trend of this government to hide from transparency and accountability.
It shows that the government is more interested in political box-ticking exercises than in engaging in genuine consultation. Let us remember that Labor first promised to establish a US-style centre for disease control almost five years ago. Yet after all that time, and more than three years in government, the Albanese government has only now brought this legislation to parliament, barely three months before the promised start date.
The bill appears to downgrade the role of the Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer by transferring all functions, powers and duties to the Director of Human Biosecurity and the secretary of the department, a bureaucrat. This is despite the Director of Human Biosecurity being a role that requires the medical expertise that a CMO possesses. This shift risks eroding public confidence in key health decisions by placing them in the hands of a bureaucrat without clinical background, and it risks undermining Australia's trust in the CMO and deputy CMO roles, which performed effectively during the COVID pandemic.
Indeed, Professor Michael Kidd, who served as deputy CMO during the pandemic, has been appointed to the role of CMO under this government, an appointment the coalition supports, in recognition of his strong contribution to the pandemic response. Provisions contained in the bill also create significant concerns around transparency and freedom of information. In October last year, the minister for health, the Hon.
Mark Butler MP, alleged that a lack of transparency had driven a decline in trust. Despite this clear recognition from the minister, the bill goes out of its way to prevent information from being made public. While the government claims the CDC's advice will be published by default, the fine print tells a far different story.
The director-general will have extraordinarily broad powers to withhold information, including any advice they consider might cause unreasonable risk or harm, or any other government processes. These are vague and subjective terms that could be used to withhold almost any piece of information the government finds inconvenient to be publicly released. There are no clear appeal rights, no existing oversight, no external oversight and no guarantee that the public or the parliament will ever see any advice underpinning critical health decisions.
This is not transparency. This is yet another attack on transparency from a government that wants to put accountability behind the paywall with its proposed new changes to the Freedom of Information Act as a truth tax. The bill also raises concerns about privacy and data sharing.
Under clause 67, the director-general can issue a data-sharing declaration that overrides normal policy protections. While this may be necessary in a serious public health emergency, there are no clear safeguards against government overreach, no independent oversight and no limits on which of the agencies can receive this data. The director-general of the CDC will also chair the centre's advisory council, effectively advising themselves.
Multiple stakeholders have rightly pointed out that this structure contradicts best practice and invites conflicts of interest. These are just a few of the many issues the opposition will pursue during the Senate inquiry. We want to understand how this CDC will operate, how it will improve pandemic preparedness and how it will interact with the existing public-health architecture that already serves Australia well.
Let us not forget Australia ranked second in the world for pandemic and epidemic preparedness in 2021 according to the Johns Hopkins's Global Health Security Index. Our pandemic response was described internationally as gold standard. The coalition supports efforts to enhance our preparedness, but we must do so recognising that our existing framework was world leading.
It remains for the government to explain how the US-style CDC will improve Australia's approach and add value to our existing structure. Labor has had five years to make the case for this policy, and they have still failed to do so. Now they are attempting to ram through this policy in five minutes.
Until these critical questions are answered, the coalition cannot support the establishment of the US-style CDC, which has been designed in secrecy, shielded from transparency, designated very significant powers and assigned an unclear role within the existing structure of our health system. Therefore, the opposition will not support these bills in the House in light of these unresolved concerns and prior to the full Senate inquiry into the bill, which is critical to understanding how the proposed CDC will operate.
The Austrian people deserve confidence that their public-health institutes are effective, transparent and accountable. They do not need additional layers of security and bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. For these reasons, the opposition will be voting against the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025 in the House, and we will continue to call on the government to hold a hearing into these bills to provide answers.