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

I move:

That the amendment be agreed to.

We have before us the Dental Benefits Bill 2008, which the opposition have amended in the Senate. I have to say that, after all their positioning on the dental issue, it has been quite hard to know what the opposition were going to do in the Senate on the dental bills. It looked for some time like they were going to be opposing them altogether. This is a bill which delivers significant benefits to families, particularly moderate-income families with teenagers, who should be encouraged to get the preventative dental check that this legislation, if passed, will allow them to get. So we are pleased that the opposition have finally agreed to support this bill, but their behaviour in the Senate on a range of matters related to dental care does demonstrate their very opportunistic and unprincipled approach to dental care. They claim that they care about dental health, after having spent 11 years doing absolutely nothing in dental care—ripping $100 million a year out of the Commonwealth Dental Health Program and seeing those waiting lists grow to 650,000 people. Similarly, they claim to be economically responsible but they commit economic vandalism by blocking the offsetting savings from discontinuing their badly targeted, failed dental program.

I need to make it clear that whilst we are prepared to agree to the Senate’s amendment to this bill which will provide for a review—we are not worried about reviewing programs that are introduced; it is obviously important to see how they work and if they can be improved—in doing so we see that the opposition wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want this new program. They now support this new program. They are now prepared to concede that it might help families with teenagers. But they want to continue their old program as well, with scant regard—absolutely no regard, I think—for the cost involved in doing this.

This government were elected after asking the community to make a choice on dental care. We outlined significant new programs. But we also made it clear that we would close the previous government’s failing chronic disease program. Now, after much toing and froing, we see that the opposition are prepared to support our election commitments and allow them to be implemented—but they want to keep their programs as well. Sooner or later this just does not add up. We will have many other occasions where we will be able to highlight this issue. We are providing $780 million over five years to our two new dental programs: the Medicare Teen Dental Plan, which is specifically the subject of this bill, and the Commonwealth Dental Health Program. They are both squarely targeted at the people who are the most in need of help, many of whom could not afford dental care without this assistance.

The Medicare Teen Dental Plan will provide up to $150 towards an annual preventative check for eligible teenagers aged between 12 and 17. It will help the terrible state of our teenagers’ health, their teeth and their oral health—where the rate of decay quadruples from the age of 12 to the age of 20. Over one million teenagers will be eligible. The Commonwealth Dental Health Program invests $290 million over three years to provide up to one million consultations and treatments. This, as I say, is targeted at those most in need, such as pensioners and Indigenous Australians, and it will help address the Howard government’s legacy of those 650,000 people still on public dental waiting lists around the country.

The opposition’s response on these major investments has been all over the place. We have seen confusion, contradiction and changed positions. We have seen spokespeople saying one thing and the leaders saying something else. The spokespeople have actually changed their position several times on this as well. The member for North Sydney, who is here in this House, has now said that he ‘certainly understands the burden of dental disease in our society’ but that was at the time when he was opposing the programs that we had planned to introduce. Now we know that they are prepared to accept them, but they are only prepared to accept them, it seems, at a very significant cost—that is, maintaining their program. It seems they think that governments do not have to make difficult choices and do not have to say that programs which may have helped some people but were poorly targeted, difficult to access and not helping the broadest range of people may have to be sacrificed in order to help a larger number of people and those most in need. This is something that we made absolutely clear that we were going to close during the election. We made it clear that we would discontinue the Liberals’ complex and poorly targeted scheme and that we would invest in our dental programs that were better targeted at those most in need.

Let me just briefly remind the House when we are talking about this program that is being discontinued that the opposition have sought to prevent it being discontinued in the Senate and flag that this is the exact program that was so poorly targeted and failed so dismally (Extension of time granted) that it did not help a single person aged under 24 in the Northern Territory for the whole time it was in existence and did not help anyone at all in South Australia up to the age of 14 in the same four years. So, not one single child born in South Australia or the Northern Territory during the life of the Howard government had any assistance from this program. Nevertheless it is one that the opposition want to continue—at great expense—without acknowledging that choices have to be made and acknowledging the mandate that was given to this government at the election.

As I have said, the opposition want to have their cake and eat it too. They are now supporting our better targeted investments in dental health but they want to cling to their failed and poorly targeted chronic disease scheme. It is irresponsible and would blow a significant hole in the budget. I think it shows their cheapness and politically opportunistic approach to these sorts of issues. It is confused, contradictory and economically irresponsible—not something that we would have expected, particularly from the member for North Sydney, who has prided himself on having an economically responsible approach to these sorts of issues.

We do not think the amendments that have been moved in the Senate particularly add any value to the bill. Of course Medicare Australia will publish plentiful information that will allow the assessment of the dental benefits schedule to be made, but we are happy to have this review if the opposition insist on having it built into the bill—although I might say again that this does show their inconsistency and confusion: they constantly criticise the government for having reviews but they add an amendment that means we will be having another review every three years in perpetuity on just this one change.

So the government are not prepared to oppose this amendment. It would be far worse for us to delay the introduction of the Medicare Teen Dental Plan because of the opposition’s point-scoring and we will not do that. We do not want to deny over one million teenagers access to the preventative dental health checks that they need. We do not want to stop our kids accessing dental care for months because of the opposition’s grandstanding politics. We think our kids’ dental health is too important to let this occur so we will vote in favour of this amended bill. We believe that we need to address the terrible state of teeth, particularly of teenagers, in this country. It is a legacy that the previous government’s inactivity has left us—quite a severe downturn in the status of and outcome for teenagers and their oral health. We know that we need to act now to turn this around. If this bill is passed, it will be an important step in doing just that.

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