ADJOURNMENT

Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (19:50): Health care in Australia is being twisted into a profit driven machine which stifles dissent and is undermining our trust. The tireless work of our doctors and nurses is being dishonoured by the vested interests which have co-opted medicine in this country. True evidence based medicine has been hijacked to serve agendas far removed from their original intent.

Medicine is meant to be a science, but it's now starting to show all the hallmarks of a religion. In Australia, something in the order of 96 per cent of the Therapeutic Goods Administration's budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry—the very same industry that it is meant to regulate. How can an agency tasked with protecting Australians evaluate drugs when its funding comes from the very companies that it's meant to regulate?

Is it really any surprise that, post COVID, Australians are now much more cynical about interventions like routine vaccinations recommended for their health and for the health of their children? What did they think was going to happen after the mother of all psyops? Why should Australians trust what they're being told anymore?

The new CDC—the bill for which is in the process of being passed through this parliament this week—with its links to One Health, is being rubberstamped by the government and is going to wrest away more control from the doctors. The consequences of this are dire. When the doctors are gagged and when the doctors are sidelined, patients lose access to informed consent.

This cycle of misinformation propagated by industry-funded trials creates misled healthcare professionals and misled patients. Most of the doctors I know are good people who want to do the right thing, but many are just simply not being made aware of the misinformation being proffered to them and are simply repeating the mantra taught to them by big pharma. Many simply don't understand that their proud profession has been infiltrated by vested interests.

Let's not forget the media—those journalists and editors who proclaim that they write public interest stories all the time. Do you ever wonder why the media are constantly telling you about disease outbreaks like they're writing some sort of Hollywood movie script? If you simply understand that many of these news stories are little more than drug company media releases, then you're halfway there.

I can hear you saying, 'Why would the media be so interested in pushing pharmaceuticals like vaccines and weight-loss drugs?' Well, in the United States, pharmaceutical companies can advertise their products in the media, who in turn receive hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in return. In Australia, there's a prohibition on pharmaceutical companies advertising drugs, but the same companies also market over-the-counter medicines that can be advertised through the media, and the revenue is a river of gold.

How much revenue does the media make from big pharma advertising their over-the-counter therapies, sponsorships and disease awareness campaigns? We don't really know, but some estimates put it between $100 million and $400 million in Australia alone. And there you were thinking that the media just cared about your health and the health of your children.

When you understand this, you start to understand why the media are always running stories about a measles outbreak or why they pressured you to get a COVID shot in 2021. It's the same reason you read about sport stars selling their homes all the time. The real estate industry is another one of the biggest advertisers, and the media never ever bites the hand which feeds it.

So what can we do? For starters, Australians deserve an alternative funding model for their regulator. We cannot continue to accept industry funding models any longer in this serious business.

Secondly, doctors should be free to do their job without the fear of regulatory retribution and without having to look over their shoulders all the time. We've got to foster a medical culture that values critical thinking and values the role of our healthcare professionals in that space. Finally, we need grassroots action from patients, doctors and advocates.

They've all got to unite to push for independent policy research and reform, because this is ultimately all about your health and the health of your kids, not profits for shareholders.