Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with great pleasure to speak on this motion. I have been sitting here in the chamber listening to the contributions of the members for Kingston, Shortland and Canberra with the utmost interest, and their contributions have convinced me more than ever that they simply do not get it. Let us go back a little bit in history on our dental disease scheme and what we on this side have done in government here in Canberra over the years to help people with dental diseases. We do need to assist the most needy in our community to offset some of the high costs of accessing dental care. But we have to do that on a sustainable basis.

I would like to correct some of the revisionism, especially from the member for Shortland. If you go back to 1996, this federal government was $96 billion in debt. So, every year, the government the Howard-Costello government had to run a surplus to pay that debt down. They did that year after year, after year, after year. That meant putting money aside that otherwise could have been used for dental schemes to improve the dental health of Australians. Instead it had to go into retiring that debt and paying off that interest. By 2005, they had finally paid it off; $96 billion of debt had had been retired. Plus, what often gets overlooked is another $54 billion worth of interest payments made along the way. So, once we got that debt out of the way, once we got those interest payments cleared, we were able to still run surpluses. That allowed the previous coalition government to then invest more money in dental health, and that is exactly what the previous coalition government did. When the former health minister, the now Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in 2007 introduced a chronic dental disease scheme.

While this scheme was running it gave one million Australians access to dental care that they had never had before and that they would never have been able to afford. In fact of those one million people, 80 per cent—800,000 Australians—were able to get treatment under that scheme to address their dental needs. That is the social benefit of good government. That is the social benefit when you do not waste money; that is the social benefit of growing the economy.

Then what happened during the reign of the previous Labor government? We saw waste; we saw mismanagement; we saw increases in red tape and green tape. During the last parliament, in 2012, they cut the chronic dental disease scheme. They cut it overnight. In September, they even backdated the cutting so no new participants could access that scheme. And they had a cut-off for treatment of 30 November. This left thousands and thousands of people half-way through their treatment. And Labor said: 'Don't worry. We're bringing in a new scheme on 1 July 2014.' So they told citizens of this country with chronic dental disease—who needed treatment who were getting it under a previous coalition government scheme—to go away, take an Aspro, put up with pain and come back in 18 months. That is what this previous government did. And they come in here today with this motion. The word 'hypocrisy' does not come close to covering what we are seeing today.

They are arguing about a voluntary dental graduate program. Let's get a few facts before we hear this hysterical whingeing and whining about cuts. This scheme in 2013 provided 50 placements with the aim of assisting young dentists who are doing their training—to address the geographical distribution of our dental workforce; making sure those areas of public service in our remote regions are actually getting new dentists in. So we had 50 new placements in 2013. That was due to increase to 75 placements and 100 placements. We are simply making sure this scheme is working correctly before it is extended any further.

Debate adjourned.

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