John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Dental Benefits Bill 2008 and the Dental Benefits (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008. The issue of dental services in regional Australia, certainly in western New South Wales—and I am sure, Deputy Speaker Scott, in your own electorate in south-western Queensland—is a huge one. Anything that helps the people of our regions with their dental health has got to be a good thing. However, the program that we initiated in November 2007—where patients who were assessed by GPs as having complex medical conditions which required dental services could go and see private dentists or whoever and receive over $4,000 worth of treatment over two years—was a break in the nexus. It allowed people who would have otherwise been unable to get treatment to do so. An earlier speaker today talked about dental health becoming part of normal health, and I think there is a case for that. Certainly, the people described by our scheme had health issues requiring dental surgery and other services, and they were able to get those under that scheme; otherwise, they might not have been able to.

Other members have talked about the extent to which that service was used. People were able to line up for it up until March of this year. A lady in my electorate of Calare, from Orange, had gone through the step-by-step process to be assessed to be able to use that scheme. She came to see me and said that the scheme had been cut without warning, as it were, and, even though she had met all the requirements, the current government had said that she could not take advantage of it. That was a lady who had done a lot of work to go through the process, and she had every reason to be upset about it—as a lot of people were, obviously, right around Australia but particularly in regional areas such as western New South Wales.

I am thankful for anything that my constituents can get to ease their path into dentistry. The Labor Party—the current government—is introducing a scheme as part of this bill whereby young people can get $150 for a check-up; but, as the member for North Sydney, the shadow minister for health, said earlier, given that the Labor Party itself has said in the past that the cost of a check-up is well over $200, I am not quite sure what it is going to do except perhaps tell someone they have a problem. They will still have to pay a bill for the value of that check-up. Then what the heck do they do? They have not got any money to have the procedure done. I am not quite sure where this is leading.

I would like to get back to the regional issues. Without doubt, an enormous problem in the regions, whether it be Kalgoorlie, south-western Queensland, Calare or Parkes—wherever these electorates are—in the provision of dental services is having dentists available to do the work. We have a big problem especially in some of our smaller towns, our regional areas, where people do not have great access to public transport or any other form of transport.

I think one of the big things that we as a government did was to make it easier for our regional kids to get into medicine or nursing without necessarily having to go to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or Perth to do their training. Dubbo used to be in my electorate and Orange is now in my electorate. We are setting up a dental school in Orange with outreaches in Dubbo and Bathurst. Wagga has another part of that dental school. Last year we set aside $65 million to set up that dental school. That will make it much easier for kids from country regions in particular to do their training to become dentists. It is a known fact that if you get kids from regional areas into dentistry they are far more likely to practise in those regions. This is what we did with medicine. We created in places like Orange and Dubbo rural clinical schools which took kids from the University of Sydney. I think the same thing happened in Western Australia. They have been a huge success. We have to continue to train our young people from regional areas. Over 10 years our initiatives took the percentage of regional kids entering medicine from around eight per cent up to about 26 per cent today. That is a huge thing. Last year we set up projects to enable the same thing to happen in dentistry. I think that is enormously important. As I think about it, Mr Sidebottom, the member from Tasmania—I forget his seat—

See this speech in context