Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure in this matter of public importance to be able to advise and explain to the member for Bendigo, who cites the training of oral health and dentistry as a Commonwealth responsibility, that the Commonwealth are taking full responsibility for dental services and they did so in the last budget. They actually announced a significant $64 million to establish an oral health and dentistry school at Charles Sturt University. In fact, they are providing $65.1 million for a school of dentistry and oral health. This is taking place under the guidance of Professor Mark Burton as the Director of Dentistry at Charles Sturt University, and I congratulate the member for Macquarie, Kerry Bartlett, for his tireless work and support, in association with me, in delivering this dental school to the rural people of New South Wales. It is my understanding that the CSU already has expressions of interest from students who are considering studying at the dental school, and that is without any advertising of the program at all. The Student Information Centre has already received more than 300 calls from prospective students from across inland and rural Australia. So you can imagine what is going to happen when the marketing campaign from Charles Sturt University really focuses on getting the workforce and training established.

It was an absolutely calculated decision of the Minister for Health and Ageing to provide this funding in adjusting and responding to the dentistry workforce needs. When I was a child we grew up with tank water. That tank water had no fluoride. The only time you went to the dentist was when you had an abscess or a mouthful of decaying teeth. There was no such thing as fluoride in the water in the town that I came from because there was no public water system—it was all tank water. Now we have the bottled water brigade. Everybody runs to the fridges in the supermarket, the local corner store or wherever. We have the bottled water brigade out there. Everybody is contributing to the demise of their teeth by consuming all this water in plastic bottles. I wonder how, in the future, we are going to address the cavities in people’s teeth that are being contributed to by this move of people to consume only bottled water as if it is the new fad of the season. The government’s support of the CSU is a great initiative. We are going to have an extra 240 new training places for dental and oral health students over the next five years, and we are going to need those 240 places.

We currently have in the House—and it will continue to be debated later—a great piece of legislation that will arrest the issues of those with chronic dental problems. However, we must look at the workforce issue. We cannot deliver dentists out of mid-air. I am very fortunate to be able to afford to pay for my dentistry work, but to get access to a dentist in a regional and rural community means long waiting periods because we simply do not have the dentists available. We really need to focus on the delivery of a workforce. There has to be a succinct plan of action that trains and delivers dentists so that they can ease the supply side. There could be so many people being provided with free dentistry at the moment, but people are not able to access it because there simply are not enough dentists out there. That is where the minister has come in with funding for this dental school, recognising that if you train rural people and rural professionals in the country they will stay in the country. I am pleased to see the member for Macquarie come into the chamber now as I have made significant reference to his efforts in delivering this school of dental and oral health.

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