Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like the member for Ryan, I would like to speak to the motion, and to parts 1(a) and 1(b). I do believe that we have to look after our dental health in this country. I was in a meeting in the last sitting week, and Peter Dutton, the Minister for Health, was there. We were going over all the problems in the health portfolio—all the issues around funding and where we were going to find all this money. There are problems with overpayments, the GP Superclinics and all these other things—the money taken out of the state hospital systems and things like that. I asked him, 'Have we got any good stories about health?' He stopped for a minute and said, 'We always have good stories about the health industry. We have one of the truly great health systems in the world in this country.' That is the message that I would like to get across here. Dental health just forms part of it.

What we have to do is make sure that we have a system which operates inside its budget. What we have to do is understand that currently the health spend in this country is $140 billion per year of which the federal government pays about $62 billion. We must look for efficiencies at every turn. When you are, as Joe Hockey has always said, looking down at accumulated deficits of $123 billion and when you are looking at gross debt if left unchecked at $667 billion, we are not doing anyone any favours by cutting programs and we are not doing anyone any favours by not addressing the issue of debt. Part of that will always be contentious matters where people say it is their pet project.

The member for Shortland said that you could get referred to a dentist because you had an ingrown toenail on the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme. I cannot speak for too many members, I can only speak for the phone calls that came through to me but I had parents, I had elderly, I had people coming to me—

Ms Hall interjecting—

This is the thing: why was it cut? Was it cut because it was not a good program? It was cut because Labor wanted to get to a budget surplus. That was the only reason for cutting it. You can sit there, holier than thou, and ask: are you going to bring it back? You guys cut it. We had to find the room to run the system. I would like to quote TheAustralian from 10 March 2014, where Townsville dentist Daryl Holmes who runs 23 practices in Queensland, New South Wales and Adelaide—1300SMILES—said:

… the abrupt closure of the CDDS spurred an outbreak of 'dental rage', with 14,000 patients demanding treatment ahead of the cut off.

He said:

Our girls were getting harassed at the front desk. It was a massive problem.

The hypocrisy of this motion and asking whether we are going to bring this back is just writ so large. I did not think I would see anything worse than the MPI last Thursday. The members from Western Australia were jumping up and down about having a plan for Western Australia. The member for Pearce got up and sliced and diced about the rhetoric around what they were trying to do there and what this motion actually stands for.

We have a health budget of $62 billion per year. It is incredibly right that we have to go through and look to make sure that every dollar is accounted for and that every dollar is spent wisely. Through the GP Super Clinics Program, we got one superclinic promised in 2007. I could go on for a day and a half about this. It is still not open. It is built; it has a big sign out the front saying Townsville GP superclinic; it has got the darkened glass; it has got everything there but it is still not open. It was promised in 2007. It was also promised that it would open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and take pressure off the emergency department. This will be open from seven in the morning until 11 in the evening, so it fails on the first thing. The GP superclinic model was supposed to be on a bulk-bill basis and everyone would be bulk-billed. These people will only bulk-bill concession holders, gold card holders, minors and pension holders, so it fails on every count. As soon as that was done, there was $6 million back in the kitty because the Townsville City Council would not let it open the hours it had planned to anyway. A responsible government would have done this correctly. This sort of motion for a $40-million program, which may be a fantastic program, says that you guys just do not get it. Now $123 billion worth of debt has to be addressed.

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