Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

In fact, Labor has been telling us for the last three years that any scheme that just covers consultations does not work, and they have not even learnt from their own critique. In fact, the member for Gellibrand went so far as to mislead the House last night. I do not say she did it deliberately but she certainly misled the House, because she said that by abolishing this scheme she would part fund Labor’s dental scheme. Well, $385 million more than funds $290 million, and I want to know: where is the missing $100 million that Labor obviously wants to rip out of dental services?

The government’s proposal has been on the table since May. You would think Labor would have tried to trump the government’s proposal. Any serious opposition does not come in with a smaller scheme; it comes in with a bigger scheme, but the proposal announced today involves less money and fewer services and lasts for a shorter time. I make this prediction very confidently: Labor’s decision to vote against $385 million worth of new dental funding will come to be seen as just as silly as the former Leader of the Opposition’s decision to vote against tax cuts. Voting against dental treatments is as silly, as perverse and as politically counterproductive as voting against tax cuts. That is what Labor are doing. They are voting against more dental services.

The Leader of the Opposition cannot blame the member for Gellibrand for the mess he has got himself into. He knows just how hopeless the states are in this area. He thinks the states are so hopeless that they cannot even be trusted to run public hospitals properly. He wants to rip the public hospitals off the states, but somehow he is going to give them more money to further mismanage state public dental schemes. The Leader of the Opposition, of all people, ought to know that you can do a lot better than the Keating scheme. In 1995, when he was the director-general of the cabinet office and the Keating scheme had been in place for two years, public dental waiting lists in Queensland were still three years long and there were press reports of pensioners on the Gold Coast having to do their own teeth extractions with pliers. That is what they were doing when he was the director-general in Queensland and the Keating scheme was in place. The fact that he wants to put in place today something that he knew was gravely flawed then shows just what a fake and a phoney this Leader of the Opposition is.

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