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Legislative Assembly
 
Medical research funding

21 June 2018
Adjournment
FRANK McGUIRE  (ALP)

 


Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (17:25:27) — (14 626) My adjournment request is to the Minister for Health. The action I seek is a report on the success in achieving funding collaborations with the Australian government to drive strategic results in life-changing and life-saving medical research, where Victoria is an internationally acclaimed leader.

I have campaigned for unity tickets with the Australian government on issues of national significance so they are not gamed by partisan politics and to eliminate follies. As the Parliamentary Secretary for Medical Research I have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Minister for Health and the Premier in the rubble of a former casualty department requesting a fair go in health funding for Victoria. That request was simply for the Australian government to match the equal funding commitments of the Victorian government and St Vincent's Hospital for the Aikenhead Centre of Medical Discovery, whose collaboration has already delivered a world-first breakthrough in surgery concerning cancer. It would establish Australia's first research and education centre for biomedical engineering, vital for groundbreaking technology, including robotic hands, heart tissue engineering and spinal cord repair.

We need the Australian government to co-fund such elegant science where Victoria has specialist expertise, like the new Victorian Heart Hospital that we are going to be developing, and where we have the leadership and excellence. It is about how we aggregate our assets to make them more significant internationally. When health funding is evaluated independently, Victoria regularly gets the lion's share of the funding — more than 40 per cent. There is concern in the sector to make sure that the Medical Research Future Fund, which will grow to $20 billion, is also determined independently and on merit and performance and not by politics. This is why we are asking the Australian government for a more collaborative approach to get deals done.

This also extends to what we have been able to do in Victoria on regenerative medicine, on what we have also done on putting the deal together for the moonshot quest to cure cancer. Australia's participation will be led out of Victoria. This is why we need the Australian government to partner up on these issues in the national interest so that we can get these deals done.

The other proposition is on commercialisation. Government expenditure on science, research and innovation averages more than $9 billion annually. Astonishingly, less than 2 per cent has been spent on commercialisation. While Australia ranks highly in academic research, it rates poorly in commercial returns, signifying why the Australian government's innovation policy must help Victoria to translate world-leading discoveries from benchtops to businesses. The Victorian government has already established the SMaRT panel — the Science, Medical Research and Technology panel — to actually address this issue. To help bring the commercial nous to the table to help deliver this work, we need the Australian government to collaborate.