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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-10-18 Daily Xml
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Matters of Interest

Dental Services

The Hon. T.T. NGO (15:22): The Turnbull government has cut $287 million a year out of our public dental system nationally. That is equivalent to 300,000 patients across Australia not being able to access public dental care. The cuts to the health system are so severe that six state and territory governments, including Liberal state governments, wrote to the federal health minister, expressing their concern about the cuts. In the 2016-17 financial year, the Turnbull government budgeted $105 million for the adult public dental health service. In comparison, the previous federal Labor government committed $391 million for the same period when it established the national partnership agreement (NPA) in 2012. That is a $287 million shortfall.

The Labor government worked to ensure that Australians could access dental health care and were not stuck on waiting lists for extended periods of time. In December 2014, the nationwide waiting list was around nine months. Following the federal Turnbull government's cuts, the nationwide waiting list had increased to 12 months in December 2016. I suspect this figure will balloon out further in December 2017.

Recent figures show that in South Australia there are 39,000 people on the public dental waiting list. South Australians are waiting up to 15 months to receive the dental care that they need. A significant number of people are waiting extremely long periods to get the treatment they need. This could cause further deterioration to existing dental issues a person may have. It could lead to a point where a significant number of people who are eligible, including pensioners and seniors, will avoid seeing the dentist because they cannot afford it. This is simply not good enough.

Additional federal funding is needed to ensure that people with common dental health disease, including tooth decay, gum disease and oral cancer, among others, receive treatment before their health issues become more serious. Dentists will tell you that early detection of oral health issues is vitally important for a person's health. Poor oral health is significantly associated with major chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, which affects the heart and blood vessels and which is an all too common and serious disease in Australia. It is also associated with diabetes, respiratory and kidney disease and many more diseases. Dental care is important in preventing these diseases.

With those facts, Prime Minister Turnbull needs to open his eyes to the problems his government has created. These cuts disproportionally impact people of lower socioeconomic status. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, people who live in areas of lower socio-economic status are less likely to see a dental professional if public dental health care is not available to them. This is due to them not being able to afford private health insurance.

The Turnbull government has stated that it is committed to delivering a strong budget and economic reform, but cutting one of the most basic health services is not the answer. Prime Minister Turnbull's record on dental health is already poor. His government attempted to cut the Child Dental Benefits Schedule, but ultimately the government backtracked on the proposal. The payments for eligible families were to be reduced from $1,000 to $700 over two years. If these changes had gone ahead, it would have affected 20 per cent of children whose treatment cost more than $700 over two years. Fortunately, after heavy campaigning against the cuts from the Labor opposition the Turnbull government decided not to go ahead with these outrageous cuts to children's dental benefits.

I call on the Turnbull government to restore the funding to the adult public dental health scheme before it does catastrophic damage to people's health.

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