Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I am proud of that, because it was the right thing to do. Service actually improved in Medicare offices, and 500 people out of head office here in Canberra was hardly missed by the general public. In fact, efficiency actually improved. But it was a hard decision that was made two years ago because we had to save some money. So you do actually make hard decisions without having an impact on the quality of health care for individual patients out there. We were able to introduce a dental service on Medicare for Australians with chronic dental problems because we had a budget surplus, because we paid off the Labor Party’s debt. We, when we came into government, got rid of not only the $90 billion of Labor Party debt but the ongoing $10 billion deficit that we inherited from the Keating government. When you have got the money you actually can deliver better services and you can deliver them efficiently.

I do not think giving more money to the state governments to provide dental services in their public hospitals is a solution when 90 per cent of the dentists are in fact in the private sector. So the only way you can address the backlog of demand for dental services in the public system is by moving dentists from the private system to the public system. Dentists are not going to do that, having just spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, buying state-of-the-art equipment for dental surgeries that they have to pay off over a period of time. They are not going to close a dental surgery in which they have built up goodwill and simply move to a public hospital for less pay. Therefore, no matter how much money you put into public hospitals, unless you get the dentists into those public hospitals you are not going to be able to do anything about the backlog.

That is why we set up Medicare dental: so that the Medicare scheme—after first going to a doctor and laying down a plan of management for chronic dental disease—would provide people with the services that they needed as soon as possible from a dentist rather than waiting in a queue at a public hospital. We stand by our policies in relation to dental. We think the Labor Party have got it wrong. We respect the Labor Party’s mandate in a way they never respected our mandates on the privatisation of Telstra, a whole range of different tax reform measures and other things. They never respected our mandates; we will respect theirs in relation to dental care. On that basis we are glad they accept our amendment to the Dental Benefits Bill 2008. We stand by Medicare dental, and let it be forever said that the Labor Party wanted to walk away from dental care through Medicare.

Question agreed to.

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