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

Minister, if you actually ever listened, if you read a press release, if you looked at the detail or if you listened to the radio, you would know that it clearly says that this is the first instalment of Labor’s Commonwealth dental program. What I have learnt about the minister is that suspense about anything kills him. He is very impatient. He does not like waiting for anything. If there is something that he thinks we should say and we do not say it straightaway, there is clearly a problem. Maybe I am actually just enjoying making you wait, Minister! Maybe we will keep doing that for a lot longer.

The truth is that the minister still has to be able to explain to the public why a program that has only served 7,000 people across the country in three whole years and spent less than $2 million is suddenly going to turn into a program that can spend $384 million and actually help lots of people around the country. We know it is not true. Even the government’s most generous estimations think it might reach 200,000 people. That might just clear the waiting lists in New South Wales, but there are many, many thousands of other people around the country who need assistance. Labor has committed to one million consultations and treatments, which will have a big impact on the waiting lists around the country, and there will be more to come.

I am sure we will deal with the issues that the minister has so spectacularly failed to deal with on his watch. Let us look at one of the most critical ones: the dental workforce. Every time over the last 11 years that Mr Abbott, the minister for health, has stood up and said that this is an issue just for the states to deal with, we have never heard him say that, actually, it is the Commonwealth government that has the responsibility for training health professionals. We just do not hear that at all. The minister still has nothing to say on the fact that there is actually a workforce crisis, that there is a shortage of dentists, that this puts strain on both the public and the private systems, and that it puts strain on people for a whole lot of reasons, but particularly by pushing up prices.

The only thing that we have heard in an election year budget is that the minister is going to establish a new dental school at Charles Sturt University, and we said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ We agree with that being part of the strategy. But where is a national comprehensive plan to deal with the needs of the workforce? Where is a national comprehensive plan to clear these waiting lists and make sure that we are going to be able to move forward in the future and have a dental care system that is the envy of the world, like we used to? Instead what we have is a growing problem of one in three Australians who cannot afford to go to the dentist because of cost. We are seeing figures absolutely going through the roof of hospitalisations of young children with dental problems who have not been able to get dental care early enough. Instead they are ending up in our hospital system, because we have not been able to find the money to treat those people through our public dental services or to assist them to get to private dentists.

The minister cannot pretend to be proud of these figures. He cannot, when he stands up here today and tells us how wonderful he thinks this new program might be, expect us to take him on his word, because what we are going to do is look at the figures that are there. In fact, many, many times in this House in the last nine years I have heard the Prime Minister say, ‘My word is my record.’ Unfortunately for the minister for health, his record being his word does not paint a pretty picture. This program has failed, and you do not fix a failing program by tipping more money into it.

The minister tried to just skirt around the detail in question time today, pretending that the eligibility for this program is changing, when he knows that is quite false. In fact, we have before the parliament at the moment a bill that makes absolutely clear that not a single part of the eligibility rules is changing. What the minister wants to pretend, by increasing the entitlements for the very small number of people who get through that eye of the needle, is that he is somehow changing the eligibility. But the truth is that 650,000 people on dental waiting lists around the country will not be assisted by providing more money to those small numbers of people.

If you are in Western Australia, South Australia, the ACT or the Northern Territory, or if you do not happen to be a lucky child under four in Queensland who is eligible for this program, it is really not going to be enough, Minister. You are going to have to be able to explain to this House why any good opposition in good conscience would support this when that money could be used and spent in a better way—where, by working with the states, we could actually make their dollars and our dollars go further. Doesn’t that sound like a sensible idea? Even the minister cannot bring himself to say no because it is so obviously a sensible idea. That is where we have got to. I think it is quite devastating—

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