Monday, 3 March 2025
Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Thank you, Professor McNeil,^[1]

I acknowledge the Wallumattagal clan of the Dharug Nation, Traditional Owners of the lands on which we gather, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

Can I begin by thanking Brendan,^[2] from Hearing Matters Australia, for the invitation to be here today, and to Professor McNeil and the team at Macquarie University, the panellists and facilitators, and the participating collaborators for today’s comprehensive program.

I can think of no better place to celebrate World Hearing Day^[3] than here at the Australian Hearing Hub—which has been bringing together researchers, educators, students, clinicians, and industry innovators in ear and hearing health for twelve years now.^[4]

And today’s program of panel discussions, free hearing checks^[5], exhibits^[6], and information sessions^[7] provides the perfect platform for putting into action this year’s theme: “Changing mindsets: Empower yourself to make ear and hearing care a reality for all!”^[8] After all, hearing loss is often gradual, difficult to notice, and usually irreversible, so early intervention is important.

World Hearing Day was established in 2007 by the Beijing Declaration and given the Chinese fascination for numbers, it is not surprising that the date chosen was the 3^rd day of the 3^rd month—because when written down, the two 3s looks like a pair of ears.^[9]

Of course, hearing is more than just ears; just as losing your hearing is more than merely having the sound turned down.

Nearly 44 years ago to the day^[10], during the International Year of Disabled Persons, Mary Sparke, a woman who’d spent much of her adult life with deteriorating hearing, addressed a public meeting in the Hornsby Shire Council Chambers, outlining a plan to create a peer-support organisation for those in the community living with hearing loss.^[11]

What drove Mary’s passion and determination was the impact hearing loss had had on her life, and the effects and challenges that were often unnoticed or ignored by the broader community. Although she missed her hearing, she said, what she missed most was the connection with people that hearing brought, distilling that lack to one devastating word, “the greatest problem of hearing impairment,” she said, “is […] isolation”.^[12]

As Helen Keller put it, “Blindness cuts us off from things; deafness cuts us off from people.”^[13]

And so, Mary’s vision was for a self-help group through which those with hearing loss could connect with, and support, one another. Two years later, she founded Self-Help for the Hard of Hearing, with the delightfully apt acronym SHHH…^[14] That organisation continues today, after a name change in 2018, as Hearing Matters Australia^[15] (HMA), of which I have the proud privilege of being Patron.

From the outset, however, the group’s purpose was broader than helping each other. As Mary pointed out, to fully empower people with hearing loss to live the rich, fulfilling, and connected lives they deserved, the broader community needed to be engaged. Conversations needed to be started to grow awareness of the physical, psychological, and social impacts that hearing loss brought. From there, together, strategies to address them could be built.

After all, if you can’t see someone’s challenges, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to help them overcome them.

Unfortunately, although there have been gains, the invisibility-through-isolation Mary Sparke felt in 1981, perhaps best encapsulated in the title of her lecture tour the following year, ‘The Hurt that Does Not Show’,^[16] persists, in many ways, today.

As WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus remarked just last year:

Hearing loss has often been referred to as an “invisible disability”, not just because of the lack of visible symptoms, but because it has long been stigmatized in communities and ignored by policymakers.^[17]

It’s an invisibility demonstrated by the surprise many feel when hearing about the prevalence, as well as some of the causes, of hearing loss in our community.

Let me give you some statistics to demonstrate the point:

• In Australia, it has been estimated that up to 1-in-6 people live with hearing loss,^[18] a proportion expected only to rise thanks to our ageing population, as well as increasing exposure to unsafe noise^[19]. To use an analogous statistic, 1 in 7 women in Australia are diagnosed with breast cancer. We know that with breast cancer early detection is the key to successful outcomes. I know how shocked I was and how vulnerable I felt when I heard that 1-in-7 figure, I remember how insistent my GP was and continues to be that I have a regular check. I will come back to that word ‘vulnerable’.
• half the Australians with hearing loss are under 65, and only one-in-five Australians who would benefit from using a hearing aid actually do so.[^20]
• although most hearing loss results from ageing or genetics, a third of Australians who acquire hearing loss do so through preventable causes.^[21]
• one study warns that around 1 billion young people worldwide are at risk of hearing loss due to unsafe listening practices, primarily through using headphones, earphones and earbuds at high volumes;^[22] another study estimates that 17% of US teenagers already have signs of noise induced hearing loss.^[23]

Today is an opportunity to reflect on all this, and, in doing so, better understand the urgency of changing the assumptions that society and we as individuals make about hearing loss, who it effects, and why. And to part of the advocacy for better hearing choices, whether that be in an organisation, in the workplace, in a friendship group or in the family.

To advocate successfully:

• Each of us needs to knowledgeable about the technologies and other hearing assistance that are available and
• We need to lead by example by looking after our own ear and hearing health: this means not only having regular hearing checks but engaging the 60:60 rule by using headphones or earbuds at no higher than 60% volume, and never for longer than 60 minutes.^[24]

Let me return to that word ‘vulnerable’. Mary Sparke spoke about the greatest fear of hearing loss being ‘isolation’. Isolation makes individuals vulnerable in just about every aspect of daily life and more.

Isolation can lead to loneliness, to social ineptness, to depression, to cognitive and memory decline. As Professor David McAlpine, Academic Director here at Macquarie University Hearing has explained “you hear with your ears, but you listen with your brain”^[25]

It can lead to people becoming frustrated because the person they are speaking to doesn’t hear or doesn’t completely capture what is being said. Frustration can impact on natural empathy towards the person who is being spoken to. It might be poor behaviour on the part of the speaker… but knowing that doesn’t delimit the vulnerability of the person who is hard of hearing.

In a wider sense, there can be acute vulnerability in times of disaster when messages aren’t heard clearly over the television or radio. The hard of hearing pedestrian is more vulnerable, and I suspect will become more so as e-bikes and other motorised small vehicles increasingly populate the footpath.

Which is why it is so frustrating when we reflect upon those statistics I cited earlier—especially, and in particular, the 30% of Australians who have preventable hearing loss and the 80% who would benefit from using hearing aids but don’t.

To all here today: your participation; your sharing of stories, knowledge, and expertise; your commitment to better hearing health though this collaboration between researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experience are all important steps in building a community that is cognisant of the importance of hearing health and supportive of those with hearing loss.

Thank you for the work you do and which, I have no doubt, you will continue to undertake. It is very important.

[1] Professor Patrick McNeil, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Medicine and Heath, Macquarie University.

[2] Mr Brendan Lonergan, President, Hearing Matters Australia.

[3] ‘World Hearing Day’, World Health Organisation website, available here

[4] Louise Dodd, ‘Celebrating 10 Years of Impactful Hearing Health Research and Collaboration’, Australian Hearing Hub website, 23 August 2023, available here

[5] To be provided by Macquarie University Master of Clinical Audiology student volunteers: ibid., p.14. There will also be a networking barbeque lunch and quiet room: ibid., pp.16, 18

[6] Including by technology providers and peer support organisations (including HMA): ibid., pp.20, 22-23

[7] Including ‘Meet a Researcher’ and ‘Ask an Audiologist’ sessions: ibid., pp.12-13, 16.

[8] The theme builds on the 2024 theme, which was: Changing mindsets: let's make ear and hearing care a reality for all!: ‘World Hearing Day 2024 (3 March)’, World Health Organisation website, available here; ‘World Hearing Day (2025)’, available here.

[9] ‘World Hearing Day through the Years: Journey of Advocacy’, World Health Organisation website, available here

[10] 10 March 1981: ‘About Us’, Hearing Matters Australia website, available here

[11] Mary A. Sparke, ‘New Horizons: A Talk Presented at a Public Meeting in Hornsby Shire Council Chambers to Launch a Self-Help Group for Hearing Impaired People’, 10 March 1981, available here

[12] “In my opinion, the greatest problem of hearing impairment is the isolation which it brings”: Sparke, ‘New Horizons’, op. cit., p.4

[13] J. Christie, ‘Helen Keller’, Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, vol.2, McGraw-Hill; 1987, p.125, cited in Max Stanley Chartrand, ‘What Helen Keller Knew; What Popular Thought Overlooks’, 2 May 2008, Hearing Review website, available here

[14] ‘About Us’, Hearing Matters Australia website, available here

[15] ibid

[16] Biographical notes to Catalogue Entry for ‘Mary Sparke Papers Concerning the Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hearing Impaired Group and Shhh, 1980-2000’, State Library of New South Wales online catalogue, available here

[17] ‘World Hearing Day (2024)’, World Health Organisation website, available here.

[18] Hearing for Life: the Value of Hearing Services for Vulnerable Australians, Hearing Care Industry Association 2020, available here, p.11; ‘Deafness and Hearing Loss Prevalence’, World Health Organisation website, available here

[19] Hearing for Life, op. cit., p.6

[20] ‘Hearing Loss in Australia’, Connect Hearing! website, available here

[21] House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care, and Wellbeing of Australia, Still Waiting to be Heard…, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2017, available here, p.72, citing Access Economics, Listen Hear! The Economic Impact and Cost of Hearing Loss in Australia, 2006, available here, p.7

[22] Lauren K Dillard, ‘Prevalence and Global Estimates of Unsafe Listening Practices in Adolescents and Young Adults: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, BMJ Global Health, vol.7, no.11, 15 November 2022, available here;

[23] ‘Prevalence of Noise-Induced Hearing-Threshold Shifts and Hearing Loss Among US Youths’, Pediatrics, vol.127, no.1, January 2011, available here

[24] ‘Tuning into the Risk of Hearing Loss’, Health Queensland website, 25 October 2024, available here

[25] Professor David McAlpine, Academic Director of Macquarie University Hearing, quoted in Louise Dodd, ‘Seven Years on, How the Australian Hearing Hub transformed Hearing Health’, Australian Hearing Hub website, 4 March 2020, available here