ADJOURNMENT

Senator LAMBIE (Tasmania) (20:16): In the last sitting week, I gave a speech sharing my experience with vaginal prolapse. Since then, my office has received calls and emails from women all over the country to thank me for raising the issue. You're very welcome, ladies, by the way.

There are too many women suffering, often in pain and embarrassment. This is a common condition that affects thousands of Australian women. Now, there were a few who thought I shouldn't have used what they called 'vulgar' language in the Senate.

They were referring to my use of the word vagina. Well, oh dear. Do you know what?

I don't care. Just to be clear, half the population has one. But there is still so much stigma around that word that some people really believe that it doesn't belong in this place.

This stigma has serious consequences for us women. I recently found out that pelvic organ prolapse can affect up to two-thirds of Australian women, but we can't know for sure because it's underreported and it's poorly measured right across the country. Pelvic organ prolapse is an extremely uncomfortable and often painful condition.

If you don't deal with it in a timely fashion, you can end up like Kate, a veteran I spoke about in the last sitting. Kate had to wait three years for the operation and she is now incontinent. Women like Kate and me who prolapse will also experience urinary incontinence.

I was lucky this didn't happen to me, but for a few weeks I had to be within five seconds of a toilet. It was that simple for me. I couldn't go far.

Over half the women who will experience prolapse will also experience urinary incontinence, and 33 per cent will also experience faecal incontinence. Between 2005 and 2021, more than 408,000 prolapse procedures were performed across this country. This isn't a rare condition; we've just become very good at not talking about it.

And for far too long we've made women feel ashamed or embarrassed if they do talk about it. Women make up over half the population, but our health system has seemingly forgotten that. This isn't isolated to Australia.

For generations, medical research was built around the male body and women were expected to just fit that model, even though we know that men's and women's bodies are very different. For example, when crash test dummies were invented in the 1970s, female crash test dummies were just smaller versions of the male crash test dummies, even though, statistically speaking, women are more likely to be seriously injured.

Since the beginning of modern medicine, men have been treated as the universal baseline for medical research. They've been used as the standard human norm, and women are just used as the add-on. The flow-on effects, as I am sure, or at least hope, you can imagine, have been enormous.

Medicines, medical implants and even symptoms we are taught to look out for in conditions such as heart attacks have been largely based on men. Even now, women are more likely to die after having a heart attack, despite men being twice as likely to experience one. Chest pain is the most common symptom for men and women, but women are more likely to experience lesser symptoms, like nausea, dizziness or pain in the back, neck and jaw, but we are still not taught to look out for these things for our own health.

Women are also more likely to be underdiagnosed or experience delays in receiving treatment. In 2023-24, we spent more than $3.5 billion in Australian health research funding, but just 3.3 per cent of those billions of dollars went to research related to women's health—my God! Seriously?

A recent report on medical misogyny in Australia showed that only 14 per cent of women aged between 18 and 35 believe their GP was actually taking their concerns seriously. Compare that with the 50 per cent of men aged 65 and over. Only 10 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 34 believe their doctors were always helpful in helping them find the most appropriate treatment.

For the same age group in men, that number was nearly 30 per cent. A Victorian inquiry into women's pain found that 71 per cent of female respondents identified dismissal by healthcare professionals as a major barrier to receiving the care that they desperately needed. These numbers are alarming, but they are not surprising to me, being a woman.

I bet that every woman sitting in this chamber has had to fight at one point in their lives to have their symptoms taken seriously. Screening for early prolapse is not routine. Many women do not know what treatment options are available to them, and stigma can sometimes discourage women from raising their symptoms with their healthcare professional in the first place.

This stigma is yet another barrier for women to receive timely and appropriate health care. Women are ashamed to talk about their vaginal symptoms because society has taught us that these parts of our bodies are supposed to be embarrassing. And, if a woman does decide to talk about her symptoms associated with her reproductive system, there's a fair chance that she won't be taken seriously anyway.

If she lives in Tassie, she will be waiting over 500 days for an initial gynaecology appointment. Isn't that shocking? It's absolutely shocking.

I know talking about this stuff will make a few of you feel uncomfortable, but imagine how uncomfortable it is to actually live with some of these conditions. We need to start talking about them because, for women, staying quiet has allowed this problem to fester for way too long, and the consequences can be deadly. Every day 19 Australian women are diagnosed with a gynaecological cancer, and every day six Australian women will die from one of them.

If these cancers are diagnosed too late and if they're already in an advanced stage, less than three in 10 women will live past five years. For ovarian cancers, 67 per cent of cases, when found, are either at stage 3 or stage 4 by the time they are diagnosed. If you are at stage 4, that means the cancer is starting to travel around your body.

Compare this to prostate cancer, where thankfully only four per cent of cases are diagnosed at stage 4. There is a fair gap. The five-year survival rate for prostate cancer has risen from 60 per cent to 96 per cent in recent years.

For gynaecological cancers, the five-year survival rate is just 70 per cent. Between 2003 and 2020, prostate cancer research received $185 million in funding. For women, gynaecological cancers combined received just $137 million.

This is not an argument to take funding away from cancers like prostate cancer, but it does show that investment in medical research saves lives, and women all around the country deserve that sort of investment in their health. More than 90 per cent of Australian women diagnosed with gynaecological cancer do not have access to comprehensive profiling that could help doctors identify the most effective treatment for their specific cancer.

I do applaud the government and Minister Butler for the government's investment in pelvic clinics, but, I am sorry, it is not enough. It is not near enough, and we are screaming out for help. I'm asking you to provide us with more because we need it.

It is even worse in rural and regional areas. For far too long, women have been treated as supplementary to men, and we've had enough. I want to make sure that's quite clear tonight: we've had enough.

This couldn't be more true in the way our modern health system has been set up. Half the population shouldn't have to keep fighting for half the attention. Women in this country—in fact women everywhere—deserve better, and it's about time the government started to listen.