Last week, the Australian Parliament passed the laws that will enable the Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) to start operating as an independent agency in 2026. Experts hope that this step will better prepare the continent for future pandemics. 

For almost 40 years, public health experts have been calling for the establishment of the CDC. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, researchers expressed concern about what they called the country’s fragmented, inadequate, and poorly coordinated disease control efforts. 

These calls went unanswered until the COVID pandemic began more than three decades later. The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in health systems, and if a CDC had been established, it could have assisted the country’s pandemic response.

In January 2024, an interim CDC was set up in the Department of Health and Aged Care. In October of that year, the national COVID response inquiry found that “some critical gaps and lessons revealed in the health response to the pandemic can be addressed by rapidly progressing and funding the establishment of a new national authority dedicated to disease prevention and control.” The inquiry recommended that the Australian government establish a permanent CDC.

Emphasis on Preparedness

The Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 and Australian Centre for Disease Control (consequential amendments and transitional provisions) Bill 2025 were tabled in parliament in September 2025 and passed last week. 

The legislation outlines the public health functions of the CDC’s director-general, which include advising Australian government ministers on public health matters; advising and consulting with Australian government bodies, state and territory bodies, international bodies, and peak bodies; and collecting, analyzing, and sharing information and data related to public health.

One of the CDC’s main priorities will be to use data to prepare for and respond to communicable disease threats, environmental issues that affect health, and other health challenges facing the nation. Experts hope that enhanced data use and sharing will better prepare the country for health emergencies, enable it to respond more effectively to disease outbreaks, and allow it to track health outcomes and trends over time.

Australia needs a CDC to address gaps in its public health response, Allen Cheng, MBBS, PhD, director of Monash Infectious Diseases at Monash Health in Melbourne, told Medscape News Australia. “In Australia, public health is a state responsibility rather than a federal responsibility, which means that states and territories function like they’re on their own,” he said.

“While there have been some attempts to coordinate mechanisms like a measles policy, they haven’t been particularly strong. We need to develop an overall national picture of what is going on in the country.” As time goes on and the scope of the CDC increases, the organization must be resourced appropriately, he added. The government has allocated $251 million in funding over 4 years.

The initial efforts of the CDC will focus on data, preparedness, and communicable diseases. Avian influenza is of particular concern, Cheng said. “Australia is the only continent that doesn’t have it, but it’s probably inevitable that it will come here from wild birds. We need to prepare for this.”

The CDC will also focus on vaccine-preventable diseases. Australia is facing outbreaks of several of these diseases, including measles and whooping cough, because of falling immunization coverage. “We need to work on addressing misinformation around vaccines because there’s a lot,” said Cheng.

Among the center’s efforts to improve environmental and occupational health, a priority will be addressing silicosis. This occupational lung disease is caused by breathing silica dust, which is a hazard among stone cutters. Reducing lead poisoning will be another priority, said Cheng.

The COVID pandemic illustrated Australia’s reliance on the UK, because “it did not do any kind of analytical work to understand what was happening — it was only modelling or descriptive epidemiology,” Meru Sheel, PhD, leader of the Infectious Diseases, Immunization, and Emergencies Group at the University of Sydney, Sydney, told Medscape News Australia. “We need an agency that can provide technical rigor and strategic guidance, support technical coordination, and share data,” she said.

Evolving Responsibilities

The CDC’s responsibilities are still being developed. “For now, its remit will be pandemic outbreaks, immunization, and infectious diseases and control. We really must get better at these things,” said Sheel. She also proposed a role for the CDC in responding to natural disasters.

The decision for the CDC to not focus on noncommunicable diseases is questionable, since these diseases are the biggest killers in Australia, Peter Breadon, health program director at the Grattan Institute, Carlton, an independent public policy think tank, told Medscape News Australia.

“Putting off combating noncommunicable diseases might reflect an eagerness to fix shortcomings in infectious disease prevention and management, which is understandable after the COVID pandemic,” he said. “It could also be about the need for additional investment in battling noncommunicable diseases. But it is a mistake to defer tackling the biggest preventable disease burden in Australia, one that has been growing rapidly.”

Nevertheless, the establishment of the CDC will be an opportunity to fix the country’s weak structures for prevention policy, Breadon added. “The CDC could identify the best prevention interventions, show their impacts and costs, and make an independent, evidence-based case for change. It would promote prevention, show the costs of inaction, and guide the government towards the best investment. And if government funding was linked to CDC advice, that would ensure the highest-impact reforms, not just the ones that are the easiest or most popular.”

The CDC eventually will tackle all three aspects of public health, said Cheng, including health protection, prevention, and health promotion. “There needs to be a prioritization process. What do we need to focus on?”

Importantly, the recently passed legislation requires the CDC to be transparent in its operations and advice. For example, the director-general must publish his or her advice and the evidence on which it is based.

Experts agree that as a statutory body with a multidisciplinary board whose members have been chosen for their expertise (and not because they represent particular constituencies), the CDC will be able to maintain its political independence. The body must remain far enough away from government but close enough to have a lasting impact, said Cheng. “If it’s a government department, then it’s seen not as independent and susceptible to political inference. But if it’s completely independent, then it doesn’t have the influence and impact.” 

The agency must provide science and data that the public can trust, said Sheel. “By no means do we want an agency that doesn’t maintain the integrity of public health evidence. It is crucial that it maintain independence, integrity, and rigor,” she said.

Not every government will follow the advice of the CDC. And not only the CDC but also the government must be transparent about its decisions, said Sheel. “If that [transparency] is not retained, then public trust breaks, and it’s then very hard to scramble back from that.”

Cheng reported holding contracts for disease surveillance with the Commonwealth and being a member of the Communicable Diseases Network Australia. Sheel and Breadon reported having no relevant financial relationships.