Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In Australia, you should be able to get dental care on Medicare. Going to the dentist should be like going to the doctor: you can bring out your Medicare card and have treatment, in the same way. The mouth is part of the body, and if you keep your mouth and your teeth healthy you in fact significantly reduce the risk of contracting other, potentially more serious, diseases. But in Australia, when it comes to healthcare funding, we treat the mouth as being separate to the rest of the body. As we have been reminded, yesterday in particular, there were struggles in the initial establishment of Medicare, or a form of universal health care in this country, and it was resisted. But it was ultimately accepted and is now one of the things that people like about Australia.

The cost of going to the dentist, however, is getting to the point where many people are putting off treatment for themselves or for their family members. And we are seeing, increasingly, people presenting to GPs and in some instances to hospitals because of preventable diseases or health issues that have arisen because they did not get their teeth seen to in time. It is not only a health issue; it is also a social justice issue—you are less likely to get that job if you turn up to the interview with fewer teeth. Someone who turns up to a job interview with a full set of teeth, looking good and in good health stands a much better chance.

Prior to the 2010 election, the scheme that we had in this country, the CDDS scheme we are discussing here today as part of this legislation, was a measure that the federal government was taking towards health care and dental care. But by no means was it universal. It did not mean that you could front up to the dentist with your Medicare card and say, 'I need some treatment.' In fact, it only addressed the situation when it had got to that end where no-one wants to get to: the chronic stage. There was no federal government scheme to help people with the cost of going to see the dentist to stop them getting into that situation in the first place. There was no federal government scheme before 2010 that would allow you to do something akin to taking your Medicare card to the dentist to get support.

The 2010 election saw a power-sharing parliament. In 2010, thanks to the people of Melbourne, we were in the position of sitting down and saying to the government: we will support you but we will support you on conditions. One of those conditions was putting a price on pollution and taking world-leading action on global warming. Another of those conditions, in an agreement that I was very pleased to sign, concerned reform of our dental scheme.

During the course of the last parliament, we commissioned some expert analysis from the Oral Health Council to say: if you wanted to start putting dental care into Medicare and making dental care universally available in this country in the same way that other forms of health care are, how would you go about it given that there may be a limited budget to spend? Also, from a straight health perspective, what is the best way to go? That council considered a number of options and reported back to the government and to us. They said very clearly: 'We can give you a few ways to go but here is what we think is best: the best way to improve the dental health of the Australian population is to start with the kids, to start with young people. 'Because if we can create a generation of young people who have no substantial dental health issues and know how to maintain themselves then we are going to, first of all, make a much healthier Australian public but, secondly, we are going to reduce the burden for generations to come on doctors and on hospitals who, at the moment, are seeing those people who are suffering from diseases that they could have prevented if they had only got to the dentist in time.'

So with that in mind, we crafted some legislation and some policies in the last parliament that said let's take Australia on the journey towards getting dental care into Medicare. Let us start making going to the dentist like going to the doctor. We followed the report of the experts, which was to say let's start, first of all, making universal dental care available to children. So we began by saying: if you are eligible for certain family tax benefits, you can now take your kid to the dentist, present your Medicare card and get a certain amount of treatment for free. We made sure in the package that was negotiated that that would not be an excuse for states to pull back on funding. In fact, we made sure there was funding available for states to expand their public health system so that people, including pensioners, who were on healthcare cards now had an expanded public health system to get into.

We were aware, because the experts told us, that this was not something we were going to be able to flick the switch to overnight. There actually were not enough dentists and health professionals in Australia at the time to enable the flicking of the switch to a universal dental healthcare scheme, so there was a proposal to train up some more health professionals to ensure that in time everyone would be able to get access to universal dental health if we proceeded on this plan. Part of that reform involved rolling the existing CDDS into this new scheme. Part of that was because the government insisted that there was not an unlimited amount of money and therefore it had to be found from somewhere and so should be found from this, but part of it was also a policy question. Rather than picking people up when they get to the extreme end, let's make sure there is support available for healthcare card holders, pensioners and those who cannot afford it and let's start making this a universal scheme where you can get access to it no matter how much money you earn and where the mouth starts to be treated as part of the body.

In that respect, I think the government, in moving and speaking to this bill, needs to tone down some of the rhetoric about the reasons for the closure of the CDDS. They may have a view that there was an ideologically mounted attack or it was about some health minister or other not liking a particular scheme, but I can tell you that from our point of view the reform of the scheme was necessary because it was a lot of money going to a few people whereas the Greens believe in the principle of universal health care. We would much rather see money being spent across the board on everyone regardless of income and on improving the dental health of the whole of the Australian population. This should not be an excuse to attack a particular political party by saying that a minister had a particular vendetta. We should be having the debate here about how to spend Australian taxpayers' money to get the best return and to ensure that everyone in this country can go to the dentist no matter how much money they earn.

I cay say that, as someone who represents the electorate with the most public housing of any electorate in the country, there are many people who have just put off going to the dentist because they were not able to afford it. In some states, there have been very good programs run by the state governments for children through schools and through other public health providers. That has given children some access to it; but, for families in public housing, if something went wrong with their kids' teeth, prior to us morphing the CDDS into this new universal scheme there was nowhere for them to go. Parents who did not have a lot of money—and by definition that is what those in public housing are—were just not able to take their kids to the dentist. By 'kids' we are talking about people under 18 as well, not necessarily only those who are in primary school. I something goes wrong, they just could not take them to the dentist. Then that festers, and they are the people who in their 20s find themselves with fewer teeth than others. They are the people who, as they go on into their 30s and 40s find themselves at greater risk of heart disease because they do not have all their teeth in their mouth in good condition.

I am very proud that, working with the other members of the last parliament, we were able to change that so that low-income families in my electorate and right around the country can now take their children to the dentist, present their Medicare card and be able to get some free services. That is a good start, and we need to build on that.

Rather than having an ideological and small-minded partisan debate in this place, we should be having a debate about how we can make dental health care universal and how can we make it so that not only children, especially children of families up to a certain point, but everyone is able to front up to their dentist with their Medicare card just as they do with their doctor. There are plenty of places to find the money for it if we wanted to. We give billions of dollars each year in subsidies to the big banks, we give billions of dollars in subsidies to big miners and fossil fuel companies. If you asked Australians: 'Would you rather the government dollars go towards giving the likes of Gina Rinehart subsidised diesel fuel or would you rather the government use that money to ensure that everyone can go to the dentist when they need it?'—I know what people would say.

That is the debate that we need to have here because we do not have a budget crisis, as we hear from the government. If anything, we have a revenue crisis. We are not raising the revenue that we need to fund the services that Australians expect and that is the debate that we should be having here. People in Australia like Medicare and they want dental care to be part of it. Let us go down that road.

See this speech in context