Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I will keep my questions brief given that we are almost running out of time. Earlier on, when the minister was talking about the Child Dental Benefits Schedule, she talked about a third of the people accessing it. In my state of South Australia, my understanding is that nearly 40 per cent of the eligible families accessed that scheme. But more particularly, I ask the minister: how will families in remote Australia get to a public dental service if they live hours away from it? And how will families get to a public dental service if the services are not expanded out into rural and remote regions?

How will they get to them if they need to see a dentist urgently when in some states there are waiting lists of several years? What does the minister intend to do to improve accessibility to those public dental services and reduce the waiting list? I hope the minister does not simply say that is a problem for the states.

Secondly, in her responses earlier on the minister failed to mention the matter of prostheses. Again I ask the minister: what does the minister intend to do to bring down the cost of prostheses? Nor did the minister mention the regulation of pathology rents. Again, how does the minister intend to do that, when does she intend to do that and what mechanism does she intend to use to bring down the pathology rents in the doctors' surgeries?

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