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

I am absolutely sure it is not because the minister does not want to interrupt. We have been here often enough to understand what rules of etiquette and engagement there are from the minister. I am 100 per cent confident that it has nothing to do with his sense of politeness that, when a lady is speaking, he has not been prepared to interrupt.

The truth is that even the minister at the table has had to acknowledge the previous scheme’s success. He occasionally does have a flash of honesty where he speaks his mind. We have seen it with hospitals. We have seen it when he said, ‘Really, it might be quite a good idea to have the federal government take over hospitals; it might be quite a good idea to have a national plan.’ Lo and behold, when Labor says anything like that, it suddenly becomes a bad idea. But we found the same thing when, in February 2005, the minister was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as clearly stating:

The Keating government’s program did reduce waiting times, no doubt about that.

He is on the record in the same interview as indicating, more than 2½ years ago, that the public dental scheme in his view was a ‘nightmare’ and, in the words of the journalist, not of the minister:

... a scheme his own government had abolished had successfully cut waiting times for treatment.

This was a number of years ago. Unfortunately those waiting lists have got worse. Pressure has grown, the price of going to see the dentist has gone up, and the minister has had nothing to offer other than a little bit of mea culpa, saying: ‘Well, actually there were a few problems with the program. Now that we are going to tip a whole heap of extra money into it, that will fix it.’ Minister, you know that that is not the only problem with the program. Minister, you know that, if you do not change the eligibility, you are not going to help an extra number of people. You know that the doctors do not want to sign on to the sort of detail that is required because it is just too complicated for them.

I got an email today, obviously following some of the media reports of the announcement that the Leader of the Opposition and I made. This person, not known to me—I will not use his name because I am not sure if he wants to be identified—had gone and looked at the speech that was given last night on the bill that is before the House. The email says:

Excellent speech—just what the dentists want and have been asking for. My friends in private practice prefer to treat deserving cases for free rather than bother with the hopeless Medicare scheme. By the time they’ve paid their tax on the miserable fees it’s not worth the cumbersome administrative time, let alone the hassles. Patient and relative appreciation is better too.

Minister, this is just one person who has bothered to send us an email and does not in any way discount the hundreds of people that all of us have met over the last 11 years. We have been faced with constituents who come to our mobile offices and come when we have been campaigning to say, ‘Bring back the Commonwealth dental scheme and provide some relief to people who do not have enough money to pay for dental care,’ and your program does not provide that. (Time expired)

See this speech in context