Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In September last year the coalition government introduced the Medicare dental scheme—a program which gave people with chronic and complex health problems, with dental conditions being a contributing factor, access to $4,250 worth of private treatment, following a referral from their GP. It was a marvellous scheme, which saw almost 312,000 people receive services between November and April this year. In March, the Labor government axed the scheme and, in this year’s budget, tried to pull the funding entirely, preferring to prop up the state Labor governments, which have neglected public dental health year after year. Labor introduced a ‘scale, clean and assessment’ program. That was fair enough, as far as it went. But if the parents of those children could not afford ongoing dental treatment it was largely a lost cause.

Let us go back to 1995, when Prime Minister Rudd was Director-General of the Cabinet Office in Queensland and the Keating scheme had been in place for two years. Public dental waiting lists in Queensland were three years long. Might I suggest that, with up to one million people expected to opt out of private health insurance due to the proposed Medicare levy surcharge threshold changes, public waiting lists will now become worse, not better, adding to the accumulated waiting list.

One of my constituents will suffer because of the Rudd Labor government’s decision to get rid of the Medicare dental scheme. Eric James, age 78, lives in a nursing home in Bundaberg. He has had a deteriorating dental condition for some years. For the past six months he has been on the Bundaberg Base Hospital’s call-back waiting list. This call-back waiting list is insidious. Any public patient needing an urgent dental appointment must call the hospital every Monday—and only Mondays—and have their name added to the list for any cancellations which might occur. If you do not call every Monday then your name falls off the list. So every Monday morning in the nursing home Mr James goes through the routine of calling the dental clinic. Sometimes he has been left on the line for up to 30 minutes waiting to speak to an attendant, just to get his name added to that week’s list.

There are 5,000 people on the public dental waiting list in the Bundaberg region and, on average, they are waiting seven years to see a dentist. Back in the Keating days it was three years; now it is seven. And, as I said, if you add to that the removal of people with private health insurance then you get an even worse problem.

Mr James’s dentist is at the Burnett Dental Centre. It is so concerned about the scrapping of the dental scheme and the ramifications for people such as Mr James that it has spoken out, writing to me and to a number of senators who will hold the balance of power in the new Senate. The letter states:

If the Government reduces funding to this program, I dread to think of the impact this will have on the increasing numbers of people with chronic dental problems.

Although the Department of Health and Ageing has sent out a letter threatening to suspend payments, even midtreatment, under the coalition’s scheme, the facts are that the Dental Benefits (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008, which was rejected in June, cannot be reconsidered until December, unless of course the government becomes totally duplicitous and introduces a new bill of some sort.

I would urge all dentists not to be intimidated by the department’s letter. Access referral forms are still available for GPs. What an appalling slight to people with chronic health conditions in the middle of treatment to be threatened with having that treatment cut off.  I urge new senators, particularly Senators Xenophon and Fielding, to give serious thought to this perilous state in which many people like Mr James find themselves. Many thousands of vulnerable Australians—our elderly, sick and infirm—will be left languishing on dental waiting lists for years to come if Labor’s plans come to fruition.