Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Continuing the health theme this morning: as I have alluded to earlier in the week, there is an absolute refusal from the Queensland government to sign up to the national partnership agreement for dental care. Of course, the federal government provides about 20 per cent of the total dental investment, so it's only a relatively small fraction of the whole, but, for some reason, Queensland is holding out—the last state remaining that won't accept the $240 million national partnership agreement that other jurisdictions have actually described as 'generous'. Not a single state has said it can't deliver their dental services without the help of the Commonwealth, and yet Queensland simply won't sign up.

What does that mean on the ground? It means that the 80-plus-year-old mum of a lady in my electorate called Joyce, who phoned me a couple of weeks ago, can't get an appointment for an extremely painful tooth and can't even chew on that side of her mouth. For an 80-plus-year-old lady, that's obviously very traumatic.

For many of us here, on reasonable salaries, it means just making a single phone call and getting care the same day from a dentist. But it's different—

See this speech in context