Lessons from a long road to prevention

Holding the line on prevention: some lessons from a long, hard road

The short life of a national agency

The Australian National Preventive Health Agency (ANPHA) was barely three years old when the Abbott Government announced its demise in the “horror 2014 budget”, together with the end of a raft of other health initiatives and agencies, including Health Workforce Australia. ANPHA was established in 2011 to strengthen Australia’s preventive health infrastructure, with responsibilities including providing evidence-based advice to health ministers, developing evidence and data, establishing national guidelines and standards, and supporting preventive health activity. It was a recommendation of the National Preventative Health Taskforce, which in 2008 – 18 years ago – described such an agency as “long overdue”.

ANPHA’s 2012-13 annual report described its mission: “To be the catalyst for strategic partnerships, including the provision of technical advice and assistance to all levels of government and in all sectors, to promote health and reduce health risk and inequalities.” Its first State of Preventive Health report, published in 2013, provided a national overview of chronic disease risks, including obesity and physical inactivity, tobacco use and harmful alcohol consumption. The 2014–15 Budget provided no funding for ANPHA beyond June 2014 and forecast savings of $6.4 million over five years from its closure. The Government moved ANPHA’s functions and staff into the Department of Health even before legislation to abolish the agency had completed its passage through Parliament.

That legislation ultimately failed in the Senate in November 2014. At a University of Sydney seminar in 2014 examining the legacy of ANPHA – billed as “a wake for preventive health”, public health expert Professor Stephen Leeder described its abolition as “a pretty dumb thing to do”. ANPHA, he wrote at the time, had offered the prospect of a national “counterweight to the big-time, burly avarice that drives health-destroying profiteering”.

The Consumers Health Forum of Australia told a Senate inquiry into the agency’s closure that: “The minimal savings the Government will realise from the abolition of ANPHA will be dwarfed by the rise of presentations of otherwise preventable chronic illnesses to the health care system.” Professor Rob Moodie, who chaired the Federal Government’s National Preventative Health Taskforce, and is also a former CEO of VicHealth, believes the consequences of ANPHA’s closure went well beyond the disappearance of an organisational chart. “We lost lots of expertise, coordination, institutional memory,” he told Croakey this week.

ANPHA, he said, “should have been allowed to survive for much longer, so the capacity could get going”. The argument made at the time was that prevention itself would not disappear. The Senate committee considering the abolition bill accepted that the Department of Health could carry on ANPHA’s work, concluding that transferring its roles and responsibilities should not diminish the Commonwealth’s commitment to preventive health programs and policies.

Back to the future

More than a decade later, however, the fate of ANPHA has new relevance. In December 2025, the Victorian Labor Government accepted a public sector review recommendation to abolish VicHealth as a standalone statutory agency and absorb its functions into the state’s Department of Health. The review described VicHealth’s work as important, but argued it did not need to be conducted independently and could be transferred without compromising service quality. As with the abolition of ANPHA, the Government’s axe-wielding has generated widespread criticism and concern across the health sector and beyond.

What was lost with ANPHA? Moodie’s answer is that the structure of ANPHA mattered because it provided a dedicated national capability in an area where Australia has since struggled. “If you look at alcohol and diet, food, obesity issues, Australia has done pretty appallingly,” he said.

Looking at the counterfactual, what might have happened had ANPHA survived, Moodie said Australia could have developed a more balanced approach to issues such as alcohol and unhealthy food, combining individual choice with stronger action on the environments influencing those choices. “You’re not going to regulate to stop alcohol or to stop junk food, but you can do something around the advertising,” he said. He points to sport as one visible example. “Look at any sport you watch and you’ll see KFC, McDonald’s, you know, the burgers.

They’re all there, and it’s become so normalised.” “The normalisation of really unhealthy food is part of Australian life now.” Public health advocate Caterina Giorgi says Australia would have made far more headway in reducing alcohol-related harms. “In alcohol, ANPHA had started some important work on looking at strengthening alcohol marketing regulation at the federal and state and territory levels,” she said in a recent LinkedIn discussion . “ANPHA had also established a community sponsorship fund and was buying out alcohol sponsorship of sports.

If it had continued, perhaps we’d be further advanced on alcohol advertising regulation and there would be less alcohol sponsorship of sport.” When ANPHA’s functions moved to Health, Moodie said the dedicated capability disappeared rapidly. “It dissolved very quickly,” he said. “Then you had nine y