Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am speaking to the Dental Benefits Legislation Amendment Bill 2014. I think that the government has to be cognisant of the fact that we are a wealthy country—an extremely wealthy country by world standards. The government says that they are broke. There is a wonderful paper out about comparing the deficits of the allegedly terrible ALP government—and I probably would agree that it was a terrible government!—comparing Wayne Swan's deficit with the Menzies last budget and the massive deficit that was registered there. But, of course, they were made to sound like irrelevancies compared to the deficits registered by the Queensland government that I was part of.

It was made mention of with Gough Whitlam yesterday—I might seem like I am wandering off track here but I can assure you that I am not, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker—that there was a vote of no confidence in Gough because he sacrificed economic growth for social reform. It was a very perceptive comment and, in my opinion, very accurate. There will be those who argue that social reform needed to come. Where I am going with this is that there has never been a government in human history that has not accused the outgoing government of making the government broke, 'We've got no money and therefore we can't do these things.' That is just standard operating procedure. After 41 years in parliament I think that every minister probably says it at least once every second day.

Where I am going with this is that here is this great, rich country—one of the richest countries on earth—and it cannot supply dental services to its citizens. My homeland is North Queensland's midwest, the country between Mount Isa and Townsville. I have lived there all my life and four or five generations before me. In that area, the four main towns in the midwest are Cloncurry, Richmond, Julia Creek and Hughenden. There are may be seven, eight or 10,000 people living in those towns. For my entire time as a state member I can never remember us having fewer than three dentists serving that area.

Normally when I have rung up over the last 10 or 15 years, there have been no dentists in the area. A person can go from Julia Creek on a 400- to 600-kilometre round trip to Mount Isa to see a dentist. A person in Hughenden can go to Charters Towers—a 500- or 600-kilometre round trip. Or maybe he has to go on to Townsville. The costs of doing this—and the ability to be able to do this if you have a jo—are so high. That is in a remote area. Let me switch to the outer suburbs of Cairns, to Babinda. A good friend of mine came along to one of our meetings. He had taken out his own tooth on Channel 9 because he had waited for two years in pain. They had said, 'Oh, we had you on the top of the list but we had to put you down again.' This was after two years, he was in continuous pain and he realised that he was never going to get there. So he pulled the tooth out himself with a pair of pliers on Channel 9. Outrageous as that seems, it is a matter of public record; it was done on Channel 9. Similarly in Richmond another person pulled his own teeth out with a pair of pliers. So in this great wealthy nation there are people who go to the most primitive methods of medical treatment. With no painkillers or anything they haul their teeth out with a pair of pliers.

This is a very sad day for Australia. We are wasting the time of the House talking about an audit requirement. Quite frankly, the dentists I have spoken to have said: 'Of course there should be an audit requirement. Surely that does not have to go in legislation.' Any properly operated scheme anywhere does not need legislation to back it up. Just haul them in. Surely there is accounting oversight taking place now.

That is the bill as it stands. I was deeply disappointed when a minister who I considered to be quite a good minister, the now deputy leader of the Labor Party, abolished the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme, which dealt with cases like the one I referred to on the outskirts of Cairns where an elderly person had to take his own tooth out. It came to grips with that sort of problem. The approach that had been used was very good, but that money was taken away and put into some prevention program for children. Yes, all right, there might be value in a prevention program for children, but I would have thought that giving every kid in Australia a toothbrush and the schools a tube of toothpaste and getting them to brush their teeth every morning would be 100 times more effective than putting something on a video screen and having a teacher talk to them. It would go in one ear and out the other. It would be very practical if they actually brush their teeth as part of the school curriculum.

We spoke all of yesterday about the legacy of Gough Whitlam. I most certainly would not be hypocritical enough to say it was an all-good legacy—and I would probably say something short of that. There is the provision of a great fund of money to address the real problems of Australia, such as the health problems. A government has no higher priority than that. There was a wonderful article in The DailyTelegraph that stated that the primary responsibility of government is to protect the people. It should be to protect their people from one of the most terrible pains that can be registered. I have had enormous pain in my life playing rugby league and other such activities—and I dealt a bit out too, I might add. There are some times when the pain of toothache can be really out of this world. Of course the Nazis used it as a torture device to get people to speak because it is one of the worst pains you can possibly have. People in Australia are taking the worst pain you can possibly have and they cannot get in to see a dentist. In my home town of Charters Towers there are two dentists. The last time I attempted to get in there was a three-month wait. If a dentist friend of mine in Townsville had not stayed back an extra hour, I might have been running around with the pliers to pull my own teeth out too.

The government is failing miserably in this area. I do not blame the minister and I do not blame the last minister. They have been given very limited resources. The federal Labor government was blaming the state Liberal governments and prior to that the Liberal federal government was blaming the state Labor governments. I checked this and found really neither were to blame in the sense that over a decade there has been an over 300 per cent increase in federal spending on health in the state of Queensland and also a 300 per cent increase in federal health spending.

In Queensland—and I suspect this may well be all over Australia—the long-serving president of the AMA in the state quoted the figure again and again that 16 years ago there were three hands-on health workers—nurses, doctors—for every backup staff, and now it is reversed. I spoke to 11 doctors that have served for over 15 years and each of them said that, yes, that figure would be about right. So we are carrying one of the most top-heavy—with administration and PR and a whole run of other people—health departments.

We had an example of what they do in Queensland. I am pleased the member for Leichhardt is here because I am sure he would back me up in this. Two of our doctors in Cairns had the temerity to say, 'A suspected Ebola patient came in here and they were just treated like an ordinary patient until somebody said they were an Ebola suspect and raced them off down to what was supposedly an isolation ward but really was just a ward down the end of the corridor effectively.' There was no particular characteristics of that ward that made it an isolation ward. Those doctors were immediately punished. Under the successive Labor governments in Queensland, there was a culture of fear that you were not supposed to speak up.

Heavens, in the Bundaberg hospital there is a man losing his leg from gangrene. This is not a hard thing to pick up. If any of my footballers break a limb, I would go down there to check myself to see there was no redness or swelling because you have got to move very quickly if you are dealing with something like gangrene. In the case in Bundaberg, this bloke visibly had gangrene and only one single nurse had the courage to speak up, which is an absolutely scalding indictment of the other people that worked in hospital who were quite happy to preserve their jobs to watch a man lose his leg. It was claimed in the press that 11 times that sort of incident was repeated in the Bundaberg hospital because everyone was too scared to speak out. The nurse who spoke up, of course, was punished immediately.

That terrible culture that surrounded the 'Doctor Death' incidents at the Bundaberg hospital is still there. It is alive and well and blossoming. Oh, an Ebola patient went into a general ward in hospital and we have got no ability to deal with them, and all of these health workers were exposed. What do we do? What we do is get anyone that opens their mouth. The answer is not: what we do is make sure we introduce protocols to protect our health workers in our hospitals, no. That is not what we did. We immediately moved to shut them up.

It is to do with the health department in Queensland making sure that they have a great PR message to take out there and nothing to do with the health and welfare of the people. You can look no further than the incidents of the so called 'Doctor Death' at the Bundaberg hospital and look no further than the two top nurses that are still stood down at that hospital for doing the right thing. They were punished for doing the right thing, and it is a scathing indictment upon the administration of the health department in Queensland.

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