QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (14:55): Thank you to the member for Mayo. I think members right across the chamber, and senators as well, met with younger Australians from their own electorates that came to this building last week to talk about this extraordinary, terrible trend that we're living through now with, as the member said, the largest increase in younger onset bowel cancer we can find anywhere in the world.

It's not the only cancer type where we're seeing big rates of increase in younger diagnoses—head and neck is one, and there are a number of others as well—but colorectal or bowel cancer really does stand out. We've provided funding and requested advice from Cancer Australia to start a research program particularly focused on this question. We did that a year or two ago; I can't quite remember when.

One of the clinician researchers that is leading some of that research was part of the delegation last week. I'm not sure whether the member for Mayo managed to talk to him. I think people like that—extraordinarily smart, experienced people—are pretty honest that we just don't know what is driving this big increase in diagnosis rates among younger Australians.

I'm not talking about the 45-year-old to 50-year-old cohort, which has been the subject of a NHMRC investigation about whether we should move the bowel cancer screening age from 50 down to 45. The member is talking about people in their 20s and in their 30s. There are a range of hypotheses.

Some of them are being tested and probed by the research that we've funded through Cancer Australia. This research is happening in cooperation with clinician researchers right across the world. We talked to that group—and I've talked to others involved in bowel cancer—about ways in which we can lift the awareness of general practitioners, not to simply discount reports from their patients about symptoms that should be investigated and not to simply put it down to something unrelated to bowel cancer.

I know that those groups and government are talking to the college of GPs about materials and resources we can give to their GP members, who, as the member knows, really are the front line when young Australians in their 20s, 30s and 40s are going to their GP and asking questions about these symptoms that they're having. That terrific campaign group that came to see us last week and that came to see us at the same time last year is doing everything they can to raise awareness among young Australians—not to look past some symptoms that simply are not normal.

But we need to do more. We need to understand what is driving this big increase in diagnosis. We need to help lift the awareness among GPs about this issue and for them to know what to do about it.