Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave, I wish to address the chamber. Thank you to my colleagues. It is great to see that there are four colleagues from the health and ageing committee here in the chamber tonight. I would like to express my thanks to them for the constructive contributions that they made to this report. This is a report that is probably more difficult than a lot of reports that we have dealt with in the health and ageing committee, but we managed to reach a position where we had a unanimous report that we could table in parliament. I think that was a credit to the secretariat, who always do a wonderful job on the health and ageing committee, and to the members, because of the mindset that they had towards delivering a report that is unanimous and is one that we can all get behind and argue from different perspectives in relation to it.

The day in Dubbo when we took evidence was really special. It is very important that members get out into rural and regional areas. I come from a regional area, but it is a regional metropolitan area. In that area, yes, there are challenges in relation to dental. There are real challenges, but they are nowhere near the challenges faced by the people in Dubbo, and they are nowhere near the challenges faced by people who live even further out in rural and remote areas. The needs that they face and their inability to access services when they need them are very great. The committee recognised the fact that in an area like mine there is a shortage of dentists, but with the introduction of the national partnership agreement on dental I have found that there has been a massive reduction in the number of people who are waiting to access dental treatment. But in the member for Parkes' electorate you do not have that same turnaround because he does not have the dentists or the dental professionals to deal with the problems that people experience with their teeth. That remoteness and the rural and regional aspect of it really does impact on a person's ability to utilise services.

In Dubbo, I found it really refreshing to see the approach of all the people who gave evidence to the committee. They had one mindset. You could see that they were a team and you could see that they worked together on issues. We had the Flying Doctor, we had the Aboriginal Medical Service, we had the hygienists and the dental prosthesis and Charles Sturt University—a fantastic facility. What it has delivered to the community is a credit to the Howard government and to the current government. A thing that is really special about it is that you have Charles Sturt University working alongside the Western New South Wales Local Health District. You have dentists who are funded one way, through the university, working on one side, and dentists who are funded through the health system working on the other side of the facility. But they are sharing their expertise. They all go out to those rural and remote areas, and they are prepared to give their support to their communities, so there is a real sense of community. It is not the same level of services that are available in a city, but they certainly have a total commitment to the people that they are servicing. The Royal Flying Doctor Service shared with us their perspective of how they will go out and help people and, once again, gave that other aspect of what it is like to live in a rural and remote area.

The member for Parkes said that, for him, the thing that came across, the thing he got the strongest message about, was the need for state, Commonwealth and private dental services to work together. It is always a problem with the states and the Commonwealth. There is always that tension that exists between the levels of government, and there are always issues around the interface between government and the private sector. I think that is a very important issue, but for me the most important issue is the lack of consistency. In 1996, there was the Commonwealth Dental Health Program. The Howard government did not continue it. Then there was the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme, and this government did not continue that. Now there is the national partnership agreement which, as I mentioned, has already made a big dint in the waiting lists in my area.

It is important that people in Australia have certainty that there is going to be a continuation of dental services, that it is not going to constantly change and that, if they are eligible for assistance under a particular scheme, that that eligibility will continue. From my perspective, I felt that the chronic dental health disease program was poorly targeted, but members on the other side of the parliament did not agree with that. Even given that, we were able to work around it and come out with the recommendations that we have here before us today.

It is fair to say—isn't it, Member for Hasluck?—that we all felt that there was a lack of consistency in the way dental services had been delivered over the years. We all acknowledge that the Commonwealth does have a responsibility for it. I feel that our underlying feeling was that we would love to see a health system in which dental care was covered by a similar scheme to Medicare, where, if you had problems in your mouth and you were really ill, you could go and have that treated, without it being treated as a secondary, non-important type of illness. It is oral disease. Anyone who has had an abscess or a really chronic dental problem will know that there is nothing more painful or more debilitating than having a problem in in your mouth. In fact, I had a constituent come to see me who ended up in intensive care in the public hospital system because he had had an abscess on his tooth. That abscess had infected his whole system. That was a massive cost to our health system, because he was fighting for his life for a couple of weeks. It was only through the fantastic medical care that you can get in this country that he was able to get over that illness.

There are a lot of new programs that are starting up. There is the Grow Up Smiling campaign that will be good for young children. When I was younger—and I suspect you will remember, Deputy Speaker, and member for Hasluck, and maybe all of us in this room—there was a Commonwealth dental scheme where the dentists came around to the school and looked at our teeth.

An honourable member: All of those pink tablets.

Pink tablets. I lived in the country where they did not even give us pink tablets. We did not have fluoride. We did not have any of those scientifically advanced procedures. That program in place, and then it was removed, and we have had various other programs, such as the Teen Dental Health program which I do not think has had the take-up that other programs have had.

Overall, we need to have a continuous approach to dental care. We need to recognise that dental care is important, and we need to recognise how important it is to access dental care. Also, the national partnership agreement is an excellent scheme for people that have health care cards. They are the people that really need to access dental health through the public system. They are the people that are on the dental health waiting list. They are the people that will be assisted by the national partnership agreement. There is an interim agreement in place now, and the full agreement starts in 2014.

There is a group of people that are on incomes just above the health care card level, where it is very hard for them to afford the dental treatment that they need. This is a very complex issue, and it is an issue that, as a nation, I do not think we have dealt with well. I think it is time for governments of all persuasions to recognise that our dental health is important and that our dental health influences our overall health. It will not be the current government that responds to this report. It will be the next government, whatever political persuasion it is, that gets to respond to it. I hope that they take into account very seriously the need for consistency and recognise that dental health is very important.

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