Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Dental health issues are of major concern to constituents in the electorate of Throsby. In the Illawarra-Shoalhaven region we currently have over 7,000 people languishing on public dental waiting lists. This is a cruel legacy of the Howard government’s abandonment of the Commonwealth dental program in 1996. It has left a legacy where there are now around 600,000 Australians waiting for treatment. In this country we have a two-tier system of dental health.

I want to place on the record my thanks to the community activists, under the umbrella of the Illawarra Dental Health Action Group. They worked tirelessly to bring to the attention of the former government—and in the lead-up to the federal election the incoming Rudd Labor government—the need to address this issue of very long waiting lists. In a recent article in our local paper, the chair of the local action group, Alice Scott, recounted a tragic but true story. She said, ‘I had one lady telling me her husband had come to the top of the list for dentures.’ I said to the lady, ‘Oh, that’s good’. She said: ‘Yes, but he died four years ago. He’d been waiting for 10 years.’ I think that small cameo illustrates the heartbreaking stories that often come to public attention in my local area, where people have been forced to extract their own teeth with pliers, where people wait year after year for attention to their dental needs and where there is no preventive dental attention at all.

I have complained in this House before that, under the Howard government, we had a two-tier system in which around $450 million a year was outlaid to subsidise dental care for those who were fortunate enough to have private health coverage but, at the same time, the government was turning its back on those most in need.

As subsidies for dental care of privately insured Australians grew year after year, the low-income earners, the aged and the pensioners in my electorate continued to wait for years to get treatment in a public system that was being deliberately run down. This resulted in a huge divide being created between the rich and poor in our society. Just consider this one statistic alone, which I think says it all: low-income earners without private dental health insurance are 25 times more likely than high-income earners with insurance to have all their teeth extracted. A recent study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that 30 per cent of Australians reported avoiding dental care due to the cost factor. In other words, they knew that they needed to get treatment, but a third of them said, ‘I can’t afford to pay for it.’ Twenty per cent said that the cost of dental care had prevented them from having recommended treatment and 18 per cent reported that they would have a lot of difficulty paying a $100 dental bill. As we know, $100 at the dentist these days does not get you very far at all. It is an appalling indictment that the cost of dental care is preventing many of the families whom I represent from accessing proper services. It is no wonder that we have around 50,000 preventable hospital admissions for dental conditions every year.

In the lead-up to the last federal election, I was delighted when the then shadow health minister in the then Rudd opposition committed an incoming government to provide $290 million over three years to restore the Commonwealth dental program—which was axed by the previous government—and, in so doing, help to reduce the appalling waiting lists around the nation.

I very much fear that that program that Labor announced at the election is at risk with the Senate’s failure, up to now, to give it approval. This places at risk one million extra public dental services for those languishing on these lists, and in the main they are poorer Australians—the pensioners, the concession card holders, Indigenous Australians and people with chronic illnesses. Failure to pass this bill would mean that 327,200 services, costing more than $90 million, would be at risk in my state of New South Wales. As we know, under this program, states would be able to use the additional funding to supplement existing public dental service and to purchase services from the private sector in many areas around Australia where public dental services are not available. I have to ask the question: why is the opposition denying hundreds of thousands of Australians improved access to dental health services?

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 9 pm, the debate is interrupted.