Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2023–24 Budget Estimates

Tim READ (Brunswick) (10:28): I would like to comment on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s report on the 2023–24 budget estimates, because it gives me an opportunity to raise an important health issue which is largely ignored in this place, and that is the state of public dental care. It is still a surprise that public dental care is rarely mentioned here, when you consider that it is an area of health care where the key performance indicator, waiting times for treatment, has been steadily worsening every year for a decade. Consider that in the year 2014–15 the average wait time for public dental treatment was 11.8 months. Even prior to the pandemic this had blown out to around 20 months, and it is now well over that. I can understand why Labor do not want to talk about public dental care, but they can get away with it too because of the coalition’s ambivalence to funding of public health services. It has been the Greens in all jurisdictions that have been the only ones standing up for public dental, and I note that it was federal intervention driven by the Greens in 2011 that cut national waiting lists to their record lows.

Now, one thing that Labor will talk about is the Smile Squad initiative, and indeed there is a Smile Squad van that got lost and was washed up on the steps outside this morning. In fact the Smile Squad initiative takes up the vast majority of the words in PAEC’s report in terms of public dental. There is nothing wrong with Smile Squad – a program that sends dental vans to public schools, by the way – but the overwhelming focus on the performance of a program that only cares for children obscures the underperformance of an important, basic health service for low-income Victorians.

It is interesting to see that the members opposite are baring their teeth at the moment. It is terribly important that we do not allow Smile Squad to be used as a fig leaf to obscure the underperformance of the government in funding public dental, especially when, as PAEC notes somewhat more mutedly, the total FTE oral health positions such as dentists in all Victorian public health services have reduced each year since 2018, and that includes Dental Health Services Victoria, which manages the Smile Squad program. So even including the much-vaunted Smile Squad program, the entire public dental system in Victoria has become steadily weaker in each of the last six years. The only pages in the PAEC report devoted to dental care are entirely devoted to Smile Squad, suggesting the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee is unwilling to even briefly mention the deterioration in public dental services over the past decade. I cannot help wondering how the report would read if this committee responsible for holding the government accountable for its spending were not government controlled. I may not be alone in this.

We already set the bar for public dental care incredibly low in this state, with a waiting list target of 23 months to see a dentist, excluding those prevented from rejoining the waiting list because they have seen a dentist in the last 12 months or those on a separate specialist care list. This is almost double the recommended waiting time for general dental care. The government is only a hair’s breadth from abolishing waiting list targets altogether. We now have Labor governments at both state and federal levels. There are no more excuses. Labor needs to stop pretending that gums and teeth do not count as health care and to look after low-income Victorians by putting its money where its mouth is.