Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The one thing that the member for Deakin and I certainly do agree on is that this debate has something of the semblance of groundhog day, because, day after day, members on this side of the House have to stand to defend universal health care in Australia. Every time there is a Tory government we get this relentless attack on universal health care. They did not like it from the start. They did not ever want it to be part of this agreement. They fought it during the seventies and through the eighties, nineties and 2000s, and we are here in 2016 having those same old arguments.

I can understand the member for Deakin being stuck in this sort of groundhog day feeling, because it was his friend the former Prime Minister of Australia who stood before the cameras on the eve of election night promising the nation, promising us all, that there would be no cuts to health. He said there would be no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no cuts to pensions and no cuts to SBS and ABC! All these promises were subsequently broken, of course, and we on this side of the House know that all of those promises were, as we suspected at the time, a lie.

From the moment of the first budget of this government, it was abundantly clear to all that this government could only ever see health as a source of savings in a budget. There is no sense that you would ever invest in a preventive health scheme that might have some long-term health benefits for the nation. So it is little wonder that this week we get the grim news that the government is going to go after the Child Dental Benefits Schedule. This is a program that has been found to be quite successful. This is has been found independently of Labor; it is not just us on this side of the House saying that this is a successful scheme. More than one million kids have had access to a dentist and have taken part in a preventive oral health scheme that we know has long-term benefits down the track for all aspects of health.

It is not just—as some members opposite have glibly described—some kind of scrub and clean. It is hard to imagine that they would dismiss a dental scheme for Australian children so lightly, but that is exactly what has happened. This was not a scheme that was just plucked out of the air. The Australian Dental Association, for example, played a really critical role in the development and implementation of the Child Dental Benefits Scheme. They, like anybody who had been involved in that scheme, understood that this was a valuable investment in the oral health of future generations.

Preventative health is such a fundamentally important part of the Australian health scheme. That is why not only a tax on the Child Dental Benefits Schedule has been shocking; the announcement that this government would also rip out $650 million from diagnostic imaging and pathology tests that people are using is shocking. Detecting disease early is a really critical part of leading a healthy life. In particular, it has been a big issue for a lot of women in my electorate. They have spent decades encouraging women to front up to get regular mammograms, to have regular Pap smear tests and to ensure that they have the very best of health care. The financial barriers being put up now will ensure that those decades and decades of good work on that front are about to be undone.

Making preventative health an unaffordable part of Australia's health care is just nuts. It is just crazy, silly, short-sighted and, indeed, wasteful. It is a really wasteful spend. When you make cuts to preventative health then you are, in fact, wasting valuable dollars.

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