Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to be able to debate this issue today, because clearly the government is determined to misrepresent not only its own program but Labor’s program as well. This gives us a perfect opportunity to set out in detail the failings of the Howard government’s approach to dental care—its failing to deliver services to the hundreds of thousands of Australians around the country who are waiting for dental care and are in need of it. On top of that, whilst these failings are continuing, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars that could be paying for consultation after consultation and treatment after treatment in dental services for our children, the elderly and those who are finding it hard to meet the high costs of dental care in the private sector. Instead, since the last election the government has already spent in excess of $200 million just on government advertising.

Put this in contrast with how much the government has spent under its chronic disease dental care program, which it trumpeted so much today in question time. When the program was announced three years ago, only about $15 million was allocated to it. Do members on this side of the House know how much of the $15 million it has spent? You would not be able to guess because it is such a small amount. Not even $2 million has been spent on a program that the government has suddenly said it will be able to spend $384 million on, even though the eligibility criteria have not changed and the complex referral processes have not changed. In fact, the paperwork has got worse; instead of three Medicare item numbers we are going to have 450 Medicare item numbers. Suddenly the government expects us to believe that this is going to provide great relief to many families around the country.

It is true that the few people who can manage to squeeze themselves through the eye of the needle and meet the very strict eligibility criteria of having a chronic disease that is being exacerbated by an oral health problem and who are being managed by a GP who has written a proper management care plan and who can find a dentist who will comply with those conditions may get some extra money because of the government’s changes. But you cannot call this a dental care program. This is a shambles.

I am going to take the time to tell the members, at least those on this side of the House, because I am not sure the Minister for Health and Ageing wants to hear it, how few people have been assisted by this program—which we are not prepared to support, because we believe that, if you are going to spend $384 million on dental care, you should spend it in a way that is going to be effective, you should spend it in a way that is going to provide relief to working families and you should spend it in a way that uses the infrastructure that is in place. The minister can be as critical as he likes about the type of care that the states and territories provide, but in many rural and regional communities around the country they are often the only dental services that exist. If we do not resource them properly, if we do not give them the money to be able to pay for dentists and if we do not give them support to make sure that the infrastructure that is there can be used to provide services to families in our electorates, then we are wasting money and using it ineffectively. That is what the government wants to tip more money into.

I hope that there are still some South Australian members in the chamber because, in the three years that this program has been running, not a single South Australian under the age of 14 has had any assistance from it. I note that the member for Swan is in the chamber. Not a single Western Australian under the age of four has had any assistance from this program. Not a single person in the ACT under the age of 14 has had any assistance. And listen to this one: not a single person under the age of 24 in the whole of the Northern Territory qualifies for services under this program.

I am taking the time to take the House through this as the government will stand up and pretend that we are taking away Christmas—that we have signed the death warrant for Santa Claus—because we are not voting for this proposal. The reason we are not voting for this proposal is that we do not vote for things that do not work. If you have a program that has already been running for three years and a government that cannot even spend the amount of money that was allocated over those three years—it can only spend about 10 per cent of it—and then does not fix any of the problems with the program, you cannot expect us to vote for it, since the program will help so few people. If you do the sums and every single person assisted by this program gets what the minister now says is a fantastic new program instead of getting the amount of money they were eligible for under the old program, even then you cannot spend $30 million—and the government wants us to agree to spend $384 million on this program. It is just a waste of money. It is the government positioning itself and pretending it is doing something on dental care for the sole reason that it cannot bring itself to give any money to the states and territories. It is so determined not to give any money to the states and territories that it has forgotten that this money should actually be directed to helping people.

If it is the states and territories that have infrastructure that can be used, why would we not maximise it? Why would we not make sure that we are using those resources efficiently? Why would we not work with them to deliver those resources? Certainly we would expect in return that the states would do some particular things with this money. We have said that we would demand that they make sure that priority services are provided to those with chronic diseases that are affected by poor oral health. So the very small number of people who do manage to get through the strict criteria that the government imposes will still be covered by our program. We want to make sure that those people who are worthy and are in need do get assistance.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Assisting a few people who qualify for the government’s program does not attend to the problems in my electorate of thousands of people waiting in Footscray. I know there are thousands and thousands of people on waiting lists in the member for Throsby’s electorate, in Capricornia, Ballarat, Bendigo, O’Connor and Geelong. I have travelled around the country. Everywhere we go, every dental clinic has waiting lists that would make your skin crawl—really, they would. I know that the minister wants to be dismissive of this, but the truth is that Labor is going to take to the election a Commonwealth dental program which is way in advance of what the government has done, in a number of ways: way in advance, as you have seen today, with the first instalment of our announcement—

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