Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Health Insurance (Dental Services) Amendment and Repeal Determination 2008 made under section 3C(1) of the Health Insurance Act 1973 be disallowed.

The opposition has considered this question very carefully before taking the serious action of moving this disallowance. We did not move this motion capriciously, but we are strongly of the view that the enhanced primary care dental access scheme, colloquially called Medicare dental, has, since its establishment last year, been of immense benefit to many Australians suffering chronic and complex dental conditions. The leading peak professional bodies for the dental profession, the Australian Dental Association and the Association for the Promotion of Oral Health, have both criticised the Rudd government for the abolition of the EPC dental access scheme. Associate Professor Hans Zoellner, who is the current president of the Association for the Promotion of Oral Health, has condemned the government’s decision, pointing out the folly of replacing a scheme which provided significant care for chronic conditions with a plan that provides for check-ups and examinations but no funding for continued treatment if any significant problem is found. The Teen Dental Plan is in fact in danger of becoming a cruel hoax.

We all know how much the states have neglected their public health schemes, in spite of increased funding for the provision of such services through GST revenue. I do not think the prospect of a large group of young Australians adding to the long queues at these clinics will achieve anything. It is shocking to discover that there are people on state dental lists who have been waiting for three years for dental treatment and then, after they finally get to see a dentist, have to join another queue and wait for another three or four years if they need any significant work. If this sounds like an exaggeration, I assure the Senate it is not. In Australia, who should shoulder the bulk of the blame for this criminal state of affairs? The states should. They have criminally neglected their constitutional responsibility for public dental care over the last 30 or 40 years.

The EPC dental access scheme provided up to $4,250 over two years to chronic disease sufferers. Many of these are, as Associate Professor Zoellner has pointed out, people who suffer from cardiac irregularities or other conditions which are physiologically linked to oral care. Indeed, amongst the severest critics of the Rudd government’s decision to abolish the EPC dental access scheme have been groups representing HIV sufferers. One of the consequences of HIV is a major increase in the likelihood of significant dental decay, and the Howard government’s scheme was of great assistance to sufferers in this category.

The Labor Party, and in particular Ms Roxon, the Minister for Health and Ageing, have claimed that the Howard government’s Medicare dental scheme deserved, in their words, to be scrapped because few people were using it. The facts, though, shoot that claim right out of the water. It was reported in the Australian on 17 May that the number of services performed under Medicare dental had recorded a 25-fold increase in the previous five months. That merits repeating: a 25-fold increase. As Dr Hans Zoellner has said, these statistics make a lie of Labor’s claims that the scheme was not working.

I was very proud to be part of a government which, in recognising the link between oral health and general health, set up Medicare dental. Yesterday, in the debate on the Dental Benefits Bill 2008, I mentioned some of the uptake figures for Medicare dental. I will repeat those figures. The uptake in the firs two months, November and December 2007, was 16,000 services. In January this year, according to statistics provided by Medicare, 20,443 services were administered. In February the figure was 40,497 and in March it was 94,617. In total, over 300,000 services were provided under the scheme. It is therefore clear that not only is there a serious need for Medicare dental but the replacement of Medicare dental by a scheme which has no provision for post check-up care is woefully inadequate.

Under the Enhanced Primary Care dental access scheme, patients who are assessed by their general practitioners as having complex dental conditions are able to have a primary care plan. From this care plan, a patient is then able to be referred to a private dental practitioner and receive up to $4,250 worth of treatment over two years. But that would have been abolished by these regulations. The Labor Party will talk about the failure of the scheme since 2004, but we know that that was a different scheme. In fact, Senator Ludwig mentioned the statistics in relation to the scheme that was put into place in 2004 in his contribution on the Teen Dental Plan yesterday. But it is in fact a different program. What we are talking about is a new program that was announced in the budget last year and which came into effect in November. It is quite clear from the statistics that this program is needed and is having an effect. The Labor Party will try to confuse and mislead, but it is clear that this program is one that is required by the community.

At estimates, when we asked what happened to people who had not completed their treatment under this program, we were told that they could join the queues in the other programs that were available. That is clearly not good enough. During the election campaign, Labor promised to be the champions of dental health. In fact, they promised to spend $800 million on health. As we have heard a number of times since that time, we have had four different costings for the Teen Dental Plan. Prior to the election, when they first made their promise, they promised that it would cost $510 million. That is what they told us. Combined with their other dental program, for $290 million, they promised to spend $800 million on dental over the term of this parliament.