Tuesday, 18 March 2025

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (19:03): (1063) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is for the minister to address the shortfall in funding that is seeing public dental patients lose access to dental vouchers. I have had constituents come to me about this concern, and I understand that this is widespread across the state because the dental voucher program is out of funding statewide. But particularly the issue I had recently was with respect to Sale, or Central Gippsland Health, and it is a significant concern.

If I look at the current average wait times in months for public general dental care across Victoria, the figure for Gippsland at the end of 2024, December 2024, is a 20.6-month wait. It is nearly two years that public patients have to wait for general dental care. I understand that there is a concern with respect to the ability of the public services to find dentists, but the issue in the short term is the lack of vouchers. I believe that there are hundreds of people across the state, and indeed there is even that sort of number in Gippsland and in my electorate, who are having their vouchers cancelled because there is no more funding for this program.

This may or may not be linked, but I do recall raising the cut to the public dental program in the 2023 budget, because I raised it with the then Premier and highlighted the cuts. The best he could come up with was an attack back at me on the federal coalition’s dental cuts in 1996, which I guess highlighted to me at the time that I was right, because the Premier had nothing better to stay than to refer to something from nearly 30 years ago.

This is a significant issue. As I said, there is a 20.6-month wait at the moment for public dental patients in Gippsland. It is significantly higher in other parts of the state. There is a 10-month wait, I think, for public denture treatment in Gippsland. I call on the government and I call on the minister to address this funding shortfall and ensure that public dental patients can get back in and get access to services.