Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Old age pensioners in my electorate have seen the government’s scheme. Two of them—Salvatore and Carmella Raiti of Merlynston—recently visited the Brunswick dental health clinic seeking a new set of dentures and were told that they would have to wait three years for a new set of dentures. They could have the dentures made privately for between $3,000 and $5,000. They do not have $3,000 or $5,000 apiece—and so they wait. Mr Raiti, aged 78, and his wife, who is disabled, have been left in constant pain. She is unable to eat many foods because of the poor state of her teeth.

Another pensioner in my electorate, 86-year-old Vito Romeo of Coburg, also visited the Brunswick dental health clinic and was told that he would have to wait four years for a new set of dentures to replace his 15-year-old set. He is a widower who lives alone. He was quoted $4,000 if he wanted to get a new set of dentures through a private dentist. He said, ‘I can’t wait much longer because of the pain. It hurts very much.’ It is disgraceful that my constituents should live like this, living a Third World life in a First World country.

There are currently two dental care centres in Wills. Residents who go to the Morelan community dental service in Brunswick or the Dianella service in Glenroy face waits of anywhere between two and three years for check-ups for natural teeth and even longer for dentures. This is not the fault of these services. It is scandalous that, in a prosperous country, in a prosperous era, Australia’s teeth should be in such dismal shape.

There are 650,000 people on waiting lists for public dental care, with an average waiting time of 27 months. Tooth decay ranks as Australia’s most prevalent health problem. Untreated dental decay in the Australian population stands at over 25 per cent—incredible! More than a quarter of Australians are not getting the dental care that they require. Even worse, about 50,000 Australians a year are being hospitalised for preventable dental conditions. What a false economy. We do not give people timely dental treatment and then we have to treat them in hospital, picking up the pieces of our earlier neglect. It is pure folly and, from my point of view, most disturbing of all is the evidence now coming out about the decline in the dental health of our kids.

In the mid-1990s, Australian kids had the world’s best teeth, but from 1996 to 1999 five-year-olds experienced a 20 per cent plus increase in tooth decay. Between 1994 and 2004 hospitalisation rates for children under five, for the purposes of removal or restoration of teeth, increased by over 90 per cent, according to the New South Wales Chief Health Officer. The health insurance company, MBF, recently released information which showed a 42 per cent increase in children being treated in private hospitals for dental cavities.

There are two reasons why we have these Third World dental care arrangements in Australia: the first is the lack of funding, which has been severely exacerbated by the actions of the Howard government; the second is a workforce shortage issue—a lack of trained dentists. This is entirely the responsibility of the Howard government. As to the first issue, the underfunding, members opposite, in their typical blame game way, say, ‘This is the fault of the states.’ They are interested in playing the politics of the issue. This is what they have done for the past decade and, if they get re-elected, it will happen all over again for the next three. We will get finger pointing and blame shifting instead of what we need: a genuine cooperative attempt to solve the problem. It ought to be remembered that Labor had a Commonwealth dental health program back in 1996, but when the Liberal and National parties came to power, they scrapped it. They ripped out $100 million a year from Australia’s public dental system; they said we could not afford it. They said that the axing was necessary to deal with the budget deficit, but when the budget went into surplus was the dental health program restored? No, it was not. And so it is that we now see hundreds of thousands of Australians languishing on dental waiting lists.

In July 2004—correct me if I am wrong, but I think that was an election year—the government came up with what it called the Medicare dental program for people with chronic conditions and complex care needs. The number of people that this program, trumpeted loudly in 2004, has assisted is around 7,000—just 7,000 people assisted in over three years when we have a dental waiting list of 650,000. The reason for this is simple enough. The program has been narrowly targeted to people with chronic conditions and complex care needs. When I use the word ‘complex’, I mean complex. Let me take the House through the eligibility guidelines which have been in operation for these services over the past three years:

a) the service is provided to a person whose dental condition is exacerbating a chronic and complex condition that is being managed by a medical practitioner (including a general practitioner, but not a specialist or consultant physician) under an Enhanced Primary Care plan; and

b) the service is recommended in the person’s EPC plan as part of the management of the person’s chronic and complex condition—

But wait, there’s more:

c) the person is referred to the eligible dental practitioner by the medical practitioner using a referral form that has been issued by the department (of Health and Ageing) or a referral form that substantially complies with the form issued by the Department—

and there is still more:

d) the person is not an admitted patient of a hospital or day-hospital facility; and

e) after the assessment, the eligible dental practitioner gives a written report to the referring medical practitioner—

We are still not there yet:

f) in case of a service in respect of which a private health insurance benefit is payable—the person who incurred the medical expenses in respect of this service has elected to claim the Medicare benefit in respect of the service, and not the private health insurance benefit.

If you have managed to negotiate your way through the maze, you are entitled to a maximum of three services. It is in fact easier to extract a tooth, and it is little wonder some people are reported to have resorted to do-it-yourself methods like the old piece of string tied to the doorhandle.

This sort of gobbledegook leads to chronic underspending, and the government’s claim that it has a $385 million program would make a cat laugh. It is fanciful. It is a fraud. It is one of those programs which has a large allocation with precious little money being spent. This government has not been able to find $100 million a year to reinstate the dental health program to look after people’s teeth, but it has been able to find $200 million a year—twice as much—to engage in self-promotion by way of government advertising.

I remind the House that in September 1995—12 years ago—when the then opposition leader, John Howard, promised that a Liberal government would ask the Auditor-General to establish a set of guidelines for government advertising, he said:

We will run our advertisements past the Auditor-General and they will need to satisfy those guidelines.

This turned out to be one of the Prime Minister’s notorious non-core promises, a deceptive piece of propaganda designed to get voters to support him. Since then, we have seen a staggering $2 billion spent on such notorious propaganda campaigns as the GST ‘Unchain My Heart’ ads, the Strengthening Medicare campaign and the Work Choices campaign.

After the ‘Unchain My Heart’ campaign, the Auditor-General, to his credit, produced a set of guidelines designed to draw the line between bona fide government advertising and political advertising, for which the Liberal Party should be paying, not taxpayers. The government ignored those guidelines. The consequences are that while the polls are indicating the electorate wants the government to listen to it more, to pay more attention to it, instead the government is out there with a taxpayer megaphone, a taxpayer funded loudhailer, screaming into the electorate’s ear because it thinks the electorate will get the message if only the government yells a little louder. So we have seen massive spending: $200 million this year on Work Choices, superannuation, private health insurance and the climate change campaign.

In stark contrast, Labor has a vision for the future: one million additional dental consultations for Australians through a $290 million program which is real money, not Monopoly money.

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