After a bumpy moment when the Opposition threatened its existence, the Centre for Disease Control is on the home stretch, with care taken to protect against future threats.
Legislation is currently being crafted to make the Australian Centre for Disease Control a statutory body that is as close as it is possible to get to permanent.
“We’re really foot to the pedal now,” Ms Mary Wood, head of the Interim Australian Centre for Disease Control, told delegates at the Australian Public Health Association conference in Adelaide this week.
“This time next year, the director general will be here addressing this room, not me.”
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It’s even got recurrent funding.
“Singing for your supper will not be a blessing that falls to the CDC. The CDC does have recurrent funding. That was announced by Minister Butler last October. Of course you can never say never, but it is recurrently funded as much as you can ever set an institution in stone in a national landscape,” said Ms Wood.
The interim CDC has been around since January 2024, and legislation is currently being drafted that will bring the statutory agency, the Centre for Disease Control, that will replace it into being. That’s expected to be introduced to parliament in the next two to three months.
This lengthy process is what will ensure its independence from government, while entrenching its existence as firmly as it’s possible to do, Ms Wood explained.
While a future government could dismantle it, it won’t be an easy process, she said.
“We live in a democracy and parliament is the institute by which laws are either passed or revoked. But one of the features of the CDC which will safeguard its independence and hopefully ensure its durability is to create it by statute.
“It’s easier to repeal a law than it is to make one. But nonetheless, I think the permanence of the CDC is most likely and the risks of it being unpicked by a successive government is reduced by success.
“Generally, success is the best safeguard against being collapsed. But parliament is there for a reason. You can’t make something permanent, even if you’d like it to.”
A permanent-as-possible CDC is one of the main recommendations from the covid 19 response inquiry report.
It will be accountable to federal parliament, not just the health minister, and led by a director-general who is assisted by an advisory council picked for their skills and expertise. The specific duties of the director-general will be spelled out in the legislation.
Also written into the laws that set up the body will be a requirement for transparency about the evidence base for its advice – something that the inquiry also said was essential to building the trust that had been eroded during the covid pandemic response.
“We do expect that the legislation will ensure the CDC publishes formal advice and the underlying evidence by default,” said Ms Wood.
“At the moment, there’s an awful lot of judgement and discretion that is relied upon by stakeholders about what government publishes, which I understand is unsatisfactory for some, and for others just how life is.
“But one of the benefits and rationales for the CDC will be that there will be publication requirements that will be explicit and obligatory. And so there will simply be no judgement call to make in many instances, because there’ll be black and white expectations on the director general.”
Importantly, while the CDC would have a “close working relationship” with the department, as a statutory body, it would be independent, Ms Wood emphasised.
In the model currently in the bill, the CDC would be the principal source of expert advice on public health to the health department and the minister.
In a public health crisis, such as another pandemic, the department would coordinate and lead the response. The CDC would ensure the country was as prepared as possible.
While “anything can happen on the floor of parliament”, said Ms Wood, the current proposed roles for the CDC were advising on planning and preparedness, surveillance and analysis, coordinating with the states and territories on gathering public health data, the hierarchy of possible responses and public communication.
“The roles and responsibilities of the commonwealth and the states and territories won’t change with the advent of the CDC,” said Ms Wood.
“What’s really going on is that there’s now a permanent and higher investment by the commonwealth and its own public health capabilities, which is intended to improve life for states and territories to make their own decisions about what to invest in.”
While the CDC would be the chief national source of public health advice, “that is not to say that [the DG] will… have duties that affect the role of chief health officers in each of the states and territories,” she said
“It’s just intended to inform them and make their lives and decisions easier via more substantive investment from the commonwealth in evidence.”
One of the CDC’s main priorities would be data linkage between public health and relevant population data sets, in order to strengthen evidence provided by the director general, said Ms Wood.
“As things stand, the national data set isn’t enormously helpful,” said Ms Wood.
“It doesn’t show some key features such as whether the person notified has been vaccinated against the disease they’re suffering from, whether they live in residential aged care, whether they have a disability, whether they were hospitalised, or even whether they died from the disease.
“Aol those key deficiencies, we’re pretty keen to address.
“There’s obviously understandable sensitivities in some jurisdictions, as there would be amongst members of the public about sharing … direct identifiers.
“And so the team have done an enormous job with a lot of legal advice to propose alternative mechanisms to allow the linkage of those incredibly useful personal characteristics.”
What the CDC won’t be responsible for is advising on political decisions about investment, like JobKeeper, for instance, said Ms Wood.
“The CDC will be there to advise on what the best evidence is, about best risk mitigation at a certain point in time. And then it will be the role of the department, working with central agencies of government, to bring to bear the other aspects that must go into a decision by an elected official, such as affordability, trade-offs, balanced across portfolios.”
Ms Wood said that targeted consultation on the bill would be invited.
PHAA CEO Adjunct Professor Terry Slevin told delegates it was very important now to get across the detail.
“We get to be at the birth of this agency, which we all hope will be around for decades, or more than a century,” he said.
“I’m going to invite you to think long term … to set aside your own individual focus, on your own individual patch. Think bigger, think long term to ensure you do your bit to ensure it doesn’t go down the path of the Australian preventative health agency,” he warned.
“Does anybody know what that is? Its legislation is still on the books. It’s defunct effectively because it wasn’t supported in a change of government.
“It’s really important we get this right, but once it’s started, it’s really important we do our best to support its existence and continuation. And every person in this room has to play a role in that.”
