Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Procurement) Share this | Hansard source

The effects of this become obvious when you look back at the period since that cessation of that program. From the other side of the table I hear the interjection that it ran out. There was an obligation to make sure that these important health effects in the dental area were addressed by government, and that was the failure. In the circumstances of the decisions of the previous Howard government, it is important to note that over the last decade state and territory governments have more than doubled their investment in public dental care. Yet over the same period public dental waiting lists blew out to 650,000 people after the Howard government’s decision to axe the Commonwealth Dental Health Program.

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